Beating a dead horse

What’s a cat hater to think?

This urgent matter of social and mammalian import has divided Hollywood, and it’s driven a wedge through such a prominent family as Mayor Bloomberg’s.

I’m not talking about global warming, same-sex marriage or menu quality at Occupy Wall Street. The issue keeping humans up all night centers around this clopping question:

Central Park carriage horses -- are they treated with cruelty and inhumanity?

Or, do the lumbering traffic snarlers get spoiled too much?

The latest shot in the Great Carriage Horse War was fired last Sunday, Oct. 23. The People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, never an organization to -- pardon the expression -- look a gift horse in the mouth, was handed an opportunity to exploit its hysteria.

For reasons still unknown, a white horse named Charlie (right) dropped dead while on his way to work in Central Park from the West Side. The corpse wasn’t yet cold. And already, animal-rights activists yelled, in unison:

“Murder!”

Warbler Lea Michele, of “Glee” fame, joined Pink, Alec Baldwin and Mary Tyler Moore as the latest celebutard to throw her lungs into battle. She also put herself at odds with Hollywood horse-lover Liam Neeson, an impassioned carriage-horse supporter.

In an e-mail to me Friday, Michele ranted against industry claims that the horses lead “good lives.”

“Good lives???” Michele wrote. “That’s the most blasphemous thing I’ve ever heard.

“They should be ashamed of themselves for saying that, because they know it’s not true.”

She added, “I’ve always been opposed to the carriage horses in NYC being a New Yorker, and when I first started working with PETA in 2006, it was the first issue I asked to be a part of.”

Michele wrote to Mayor Bloomberg, “With the number of horse-drawn carriage accidents and related deaths rising, it’s painfully clear that these animals do not belong on busy city streets.”

The issue has proved so blisteringly emotional that, before an animal autopsy was even ordered (or Michele’s “horse deaths rising” assertion could be disputed), the frenzy reached a Hollywood roar.

It was up to the mayor to defend the traditionally New York carriage horses. It’s an industry so hyper-regulated, the beasts are required by law to receive five weeks’ vacation a year, work no more than nine hours a day, and get the day off in extreme heat and cold -- part of a benefits package that would make many a human worker jealous.

Many of the horses “wouldn’t be alive if they didn’t have the job,” said the mayor. “I have no idea what goes through [critics’] minds. Why anyone wants to destroy something that is part of New York’s heritage and that the tourists love, you should remind those people that the way we pay municipal employees is with taxpayers’ money. The taxpayers depend on tourists coming.”