Found out my town still has a law about keeping pet emus on leashes

I was digging through old city records last week for a school project, and I found this law from 1923 that says all emus must be on a leash shorter than 6 feet when in public. I live in a normal suburb in Ohio, so I asked my neighbor who has chickens if he knew anything about it. He laughed and showed me a news clipping from 1921 about a traveling circus that lost four emus, and they apparently roamed through Main Street for three days. The law was kept on the books after the circus paid fines, and nobody ever removed it because no one here owns an emu. I told my history teacher, and he said half the stuff in the municipal code is from stuff like that, like no spitting on sidewalks from the 1800s. Has anyone else found a law in their town that just seems like a joke from a hundred years ago?

3 comments

3 Comments

jamieb8027d ago

And those old circus emus probably started a whole secret bloodline hiding in the Ohio woods somewhere.

roberts.leo27d ago

Read somewhere that a guy in southern Ohio found a weird looking bird skull by his creek a few years back. Took it to a biologist who told him it wasn't any native species. Emu makes more sense than anything else that runs around those woods. The circus emu thing tracks too since there was that big train wreck near Chillicothe back in the 20s that scattered half a menagerie into the hills. Some of those emus just kept going.

claire87226d ago

You'd need an awful lot of emus to keep a population going that long.