Supermodel Bella Hadid pleads for ‘rescue’ of abused NYC carriage horse
She’s modeling good behavior.
Supermodel Bella Hadid is pleading for help for the New York City carriage horse that collapsed on a busy Manhattan street and got flogged by its driver earlier this month.
“Ryder needs immediate help and to be released from his abusers,” Hadid, 25, wrote on Instagram Tuesday, along with a New York Post photo of the animal with its ribs jutting out.
The frequent Vogue cover girl — an avid horseback rider since childhood — went on to ask for donations for Ryder and expressed interest in caring for the steed herself.
“I would like to rescue him and take him home to safety,” she wrote. “Please message me if you have any information. Please.”
A former carriage horse industry advocate told The Post Tuesday that Ryder’s owner, Ian McKeever, said he moved the steed to a farm upstate — but animal rights activists quickly rebuffed the claim.
“Ryder is not ‘retired,’ he is being held hostage by his abusers — the very people who have been caught in lie after lie about his horrific neglect and criminal mistreatment,” said Edita Birnkrant, executive director of the animal rights group NYCLASS.
The Post reported Monday that Ryder was examined by a veterinarian following the Aug. 10 ordeal, during which the sick animal buckled at Ninth Avenue and West 45th Street — then lay there for more than an hour as his driver struck him and screamed for him to get up.
“An initial diagnosis determined that the horse was 28-30-years-old rather than the aforementioned 13-years-old, that it was malnourished, underweight and suffers from the equine neurological disorder EPM (Equine Protozoal Myeloencephalitis),” according to an NYPD report.
The horse also had abrasions on its legs as a result of its collapse.
McKeever has not returned calls seeking comment about Ryder’s whereabouts. He was driving the carriage pulled by Ryder on the day of his collapse, cops said in the report.
Christina Hansen, a spokeswoman for the TWU Local 100 Central Park Horse Carriages, said the organization was keeping Ryder at one of its farms for vacationing carriage horses.
“We’re not going to tell people because we’ve had incidents of animal rights activists trying to steal horses or damage property,” she said.
“A lot of these groups are on the FBI terrorism watch list. It’s really not safe for the horse for us to make this public information.”
The horse activist groups said in a statement that none of them were on a watch list.
