Weird things happen to horses. Horses are big. They’re curious. They eat things they shouldn’t. Many of them live in areas nature never intended for them to be, often with other species they weren’t intended to mix with. People use them to perform tasks they weren’t designed to do. Roll all of this up, and weird things happen to horses.

And, because they’re considered fairly exotic animals by the majority of the public and mainstream media, when a weird thing happens to a horse, it tends to make the news.

This is where I come in. I edit the news on TheHorse.com. A big part of that involves staying on top of horse/donkey/pony/mule/zebra news being disseminated by local mainstream media outlets to identify leads that might interest our readers.

And sometimes … just sometimes … I strike gold. The truly weird. Whether it’s a custody battle over the skeleton of a horse allegedly mutilated by aliens, or a donkey put in jail for ornery behavior, these occasional stories bring a wee bit of levity to our usual fare of equine health care, management, and welfare news