It’s a scene all Melbourne residents will recognise; the clip-clop of horse-drawn carriages going by, the sight of red-coats, top hats, handsome equines and coaches of smiling children waving to people like miniature royals.

A charming sight, but where families and tourists see the quaint romance of a by-gone era, the ceaseless, screeching moralisers that so infect us see the cruel structures of oppression; a vast machinery of torment where the “struggles of non-human animals” abut the cynical business practices and questionable cultural traditions of deplorable abusers.