Silk ties were loosened early Monday morning as local civic leaders sought the next wave of decisions after Jerry, of horse-drawn carriage fame, unwittingly became a victim of animal activists last week.

What began as a routine example of toppled horse via heat, overwork, and exhaustion quickly turned dire when groups such as PETA and the similarly acronymed began to, in their words, “worry,” and “question the ethicality of the treatment of sentient beings as veritable slaves for human indulgence.”

Carriages For Hire, the outfit behind Jerry’s joyous romps through downtown, said that Jerry has colic and that we, “seriously don’t want to really imagine what that looks like, so that is probably why this happened, the pain from that.”

When queried on the heat’s effect on the horse from both the sun’s direct rays as well as the stored and reflected heat of the cement and asphalt on which it is giddied up, the manager which refused to use her name decided to reply with, ”Look, Cinderella isn’t ever going to go to the Ball in one of those dumb city tour buses. And hey, cars and buses break down, too, right? Yep.”

A reminder of the cognitive faculties of the horses was returned with five straight out-of-sync blinks from the manager, then this statement, “How else are we going to shuffle tourists around [in the high-heat desert temperatures]? It wasn’t even 100 degrees. We all like to take naps when it is a little hot.”

While Jerry took his nap on the scorching asphalt, his handlers felt it best to tie ropes around his body and drag him into a trailer, eventually to be taken to the [poorly descriptive] stable by forklift.

“One horse collapses, and those dumb hippie granola satan worshippers want the [antiquated] horse-drawn carriage business to collapse?”

Meanwhile, the unconscious Jerry has been given honorary Pioneer credentials by the city at a news conference held to address this hot-topic issue. This was apparently an attempt at appeasement, which resulted in a large preaching to the choir rather than soothing the detractors.

“So the gimmick applying pioneer martyrdom to victims of human indecency is solving this problem in what way?” was the consensus of a group of animal activists at the news conference.

City council members are calling the incident a one-time fluke, and said they are very concerned and hope that the one-time fluke doesn’t happen again. And again. And again and again and again and again. They promised to look at the circumstances surrounding Jerry, so that they can call a spade a spayed.