THE HORSE DRAGGING

I was little when it happened, but it became the stuff of legend. This has been patched together from stories of people that were involved:

One night, two farmers and their lawyer friend are hanging out, enjoying life. The two farmers were drinking very heavily, but the lawyer only had one, maybe two beers. One of the farmers owned a horse that had recently died, and had yet to dispose of the carcass. At some point late in the night, the three decided to dispose of the dead horse by driving it to the landfill. This involved loading the horse into the bed of a pickup truck, securing it, driving into town, through town, then to the landfill out in the country. The horse corpse was loaded into the truck and tied down with a single chain. The lawyer drove, while the two farmers, incredibly intoxicated, were passengers. Things went wrong.

A sheriff's deputy traveling down the highway noticed a pickup truck heading towards town that seemed to be dragging something. Upon closer inspection, this deputy noticed that a dead horse was being dragged at highway speeds behind the truck by a chain. The deputy, knowing better, followed the truck into city limits, alerted the local police, and went on with his night.

Somewhere around this point in the story, the occupants of the truck noticed that their cargo had not been properly secured. Now in this situation, you really only have two choices: Pull over and re-secure your load, or drag a dead horse around the town square until someone stops you. They chose the latter.

The three men dragged the disintegrating horse to the town square, which was a block of 1-way road surrounding the county courthouse and surrounded by shops and bars, and circled it until local police stopped them. This drew a crowd of onlookers who were leaving the now-closing bars. They ended up not being ticketed or arrested, because no laws had been broken. From a conversation with the responding officer, there was no DUI charge because the driver was neither intoxicated nor over the legal BAC limit. There was no cruelty to animals charge because the animal in question was dead. There was no charge for improper disposal of an animal carcass because, at least at the time, that statute only applied to veterinarians. They couldn't even charge anyone with disturbing the peace, because the statute required a witness to claim that they had been disturbed by the conduct, and did not allow law enforcement to make such a claim. The only non-law enforcement witnesses were drunk people who thought it was hilarious. This was pre-internet, or else the story would have blown up. I can hardly find any record of it anymore.