Though facing a fine for not walking a pet on a leash may be a reality to some pet owners, a leash alone was not enough to help one man pay the price for his animal excursion.
Police fined a man for using his car to walk his horse along a road in mainland China. Traffic cameras caught the man driving along the side of the road in his shiny black car with his shiny black horse in tow, according to multiple Chinese news outlets.
Police in Hai’an City, Jiangsu Province, were dispatched to warn the driver, who also owns the horse, of his dangerous behavior, and let him off with a 200 yuan ($30) fine on April 20. The man leading the horse was not punished.
“We were riding, but it was just too tiring,” one of the men involved said to the police, which was later reported by Chinese short-video news outlet Pear Video.
“Then we decided to sit inside [the car] and lead it with a rope for a while.”
The men were unidentified in the reports.
Driving With ‘Horse Power’
Traffic camera footage at an intersection shows the the car and horse duo preparing to make a right turn. A man has half of his body out of the rear-right window, with his arm out towards the horse’s face. The horse is trotting right along with the car, and a motorcyclist looks over at the scene.
The man said he was bringing the horse home from a friend’s house, who was looking after the animal for him, according Chinese media the Modern Express.
Two police officers were preparing to stop the two, having parked on the side of the road. The men and horse drove right by them, ignoring one of the officer’s shouts.
“I had no idea that the horse and the car were together,” one of the officers told Pear Videos. “When they were ahead of me, and I started shouting at them, that’s when I realized the car was pulling the horse.”
“I had thought, at that time, that the horse must have just been frightened,” the officer said.
The officer said that when he asked the driver what he was doing, the driver told him the horse wouldn’t stop. He may have been implying that the horse wouldn’t cause a hazard by stopping on the road.
The men tried to get out of the situation. “The horse is tired, we’re tired too,” said one of the men from the car, according to Pear Videos. “We live nearby.”
Still, the officer reprimanded them and said that a horse on the road is a danger to other drivers. Furthermore, the passenger in the backseat was not wearing his seat belt. The driver was fined 200 yuan ($30) and given a “criticism and education,” a phrase in China which boils down to: a warning.
