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» How to party like a coffeehouse: punish a pony!

Four Barrel Coffee celebrates its second birthday today with a lovely gesture of customer appreciation: free coffee until 4 p.m.! Also, inexplicably, two hours of free pony rides “for the kiddies.” How happy the child and the pony appear!

We’ve never had a problem with Four Barrel—yes they sell bacon donuts, but that’s their choice, and they’ve got soy milk—but PONY RIDES? What did a pony ever do to you that you think it’s OK to force one to walk up and down the 300 block of Valencia Street for two hours in the middle of the day? Why not just give them all free foamed milk, or animalicious bacon donut pieces, or anything that doesn’t involve making an animal perform a ridiculous task?

Although this could be a genius idea: kids could see the miserable pony, realize that using animals for our personal enjoyment is wrong—real ponies aren’t toys!—and take their first little steps on the road to animal-rights activism. It’s probably much more effective than explaining you drink soy milk because cows don’t “give” anything and aren’t the least bit “happy.”