Edie Falco testifies in support of ban
Actress and animal advocate Edie Falco testifies that animals are not ours to use, expresses horror at carriage conditions, and says naming the law for Romanch is the greatest honor of her lifetime.
Hi, my name is Edie Falco.
I am an actress and I'm an animal lover and advocate.
For some reason, I was asked to be here today to tell people how I feel about this.
And I think I'm going to go way out on a limb here and say from the deepest part of my heart,
These animals are not ours.
These animals are not ours.
They are not put on this planet to do our bidding.
They're not for us to look at and say, oh, that one's going to pull me through the park, and this one I'm going to eat, and this one I'm going to wear, and this one I'm going to experiment on for drugs.
You know, this is the wrong meeting for this perhaps, but insofar as my animal advocacy, these are not our animals.
They have the right to a God-given, if that's what you believe, life just as we do.
I have a fantasy of us looking back on this in 200 years and saying, remember that when we had those big, beautiful, majestic animals pulling us on carriages?
The fact that there's anybody in this room that can look at an animal with the apparatus and the carriage and the people in the traffic and the sounds and the smells and the heat and say, sure, yeah, that's reasonable.
The first time I saw that 40 years ago, I thought, what is this?
It's 40 years later.
I've looked face to face with politicians in this city since then who have said, no, we're on it, we're on it.
It's our platform.
We're going to make it happen.
To be here, I'm going to say very quickly, I'm an empath.
It's what I do for a living, and I can't always turn it off.
And to listen to the Romantics family and what they are going through knocked the wind out of me.
I have an 18-year-old, and I came to this city as an 18-year-old with dreams and a life to start.
It's 40 years later, and I've lived that dream 4,000 times over, and that I am here with the honor of potentially naming this law.
For Romant, for the future he will not have and the dreams he will not get to realize, is the greatest honor of my lifetime.
It's time, everybody.
It's time.
It's time.
You can't pretend that you don't know what you know.
That's it.
Sorry.
Thank you.
No, thank you very much.
Bob Holden, Mr.
Holden.