HORSES pulling carriages around Rome are to be equipped with "black box" devices to track their working patterns after one collapsed outside the Colosseum last week and had to be put down in front of a crowd of tourists.

Under plans drawn up by Rome city council, all horses will be equipped with pedometers.

Fabio De Lillo, the head of environment for the council, said that it was "the equine equivalent of a taxi meter, which will also work as a kind of black box. It will tell us how many hours a horse has worked and whether the obligatory breaks have been observed".

Italian animal rights activists have called for the carriages to be scrapped, alleging that the 90 horses that pull the carriages are overworked in often dangerous traffic and are sent to the knacker's yard when they have outlived their usefulness.

Drivers are required to give their horses a 30-minute break after every trip and are banned from using them between 1-5pm from July to September to avoid the heat. Campaigners maintain that the rules are often flouted.

Mr De Lillo said checks by inspectors would be increased from once a year to once a month, and twice a month in the summer. Horses would also be fitted with microchips recording the animal's identity, age and history. He said that a majority of drivers as well as animal welfare associations supported the plan.

Last week a 17-year-old bay called Birillo fell and broke a leg on a cobbled street near the Colosseum when it panicked after being grazed by a lorry that failed to stop. Veterinary surgeons gave the horse a lethal injection after it had been on the ground in agony for four hours, watched by a horrified crowd. Another horse died after being struck by a car in June.

ENPA, the Italian Society for the Protection of Animals, has asked the Mayor of Rome, Gianni Alemanno, to convert horse-drawn carriage licences into taxi licences.

Carlo Rocchi, the head of ENPA, said that drivers often left their horses locked up in dark and humid communal stables for weeks when it rained.

The drivers insist that they look after their horses, "as if they were our own children".

The mayor has defended the carriages as "a Roman tradition", with the sound of hooves on cobblestones recalling a bygone age.

Mr De Lillo confirmed that the carriages would not be withdrawn, because they were a symbol of Rome. He said that the answer lay not in abolishing the carriages but in ensuring that the rules governing their use were tightened up and observed.

Gianni Mancuso, a deputy for the ruling centre-right People of Liberty alliance led by Silvio Berlusconi, said the horses were also a health hazard. Their parking places - including St Peter's Square, the Colosseum, the Pantheon and the Spanish Steps - were "open-air latrines", and although horses were supposed to wear "equine nappies", they did not always do so.

Monica Cirinni, a former city council head of animal welfare, said the carriages - known in Italian as botticelle - should be confined to parks and green areas.

Corrado Augias, the author of The Secrets of Rome, said that although the idea of a horse-drawn ride "to the clip-clop of hooves on asphalt" appeared romantic, the truth was that horse-drawn vehicles were the relic of "an epoch long since overtaken by revolutionary changes in transport". He said that Rome should follow the example of New York, where horse-drawn carriages used Central Park and on the whole avoided traffic.

The Times