What are Minnesota’s weirdest laws?
Statutes about collecting gopher bounties and chasing greased pigs are on the books. But some of our most oft-repeated loony laws are simply tall tales.
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Is it against the law to cross the Minnesota/Wisconsin state border with a duck atop your head?
For years, Minnesotans have shared this as an example of one of the state’s looniest laws. It pops up often in lists online.
Reader Briana Burrows had been wondering about this and other supposed strange rules on the books here. At the State Fair this summer, she submitted this question to Curious Minnesota, the Strib’s reader-powered reporting project: “What are Minnesota’s weirdest laws?”
This was by far the most popular question among fairgoers, who voted on their favorite Curious Minnesota questions of the day. Many who voted repeated the same tale about a ban on crossing state lines with a bird on your head.
It doesn’t appear to be true, however. Legal experts, including the Minnesota State Law Library and area law firms, said they don’t see a trace of it in current and former state statutes. It falls instead into the category of folklore.
This and other legal legends (including one about it being illegal to tease skunks in Minnesota — a bad, if not banned, idea) likely emerged when people misinterpreted actual laws. For example, there is a statute from 1913 governing the sale of a kind of fabric called “cotton duck” that some think might be at the root of the bird border-crossing ban myth. And while teasing isn’t mentioned in the statute, a state law does ban the buying and selling of live skunks.
In other cases, people may have simply passed along a funny rule without looking into its veracity.
“It’s just like anything, things get spread through the telephone game,” said Russell Nicolet, the billboard-famous personal-injury lawyer whose firm practices in Minnesota and three other states. Sometimes the precise language of a law can also be misinterpreted, he said.
There are fewer weird laws in Minnesota today than there were a decade ago. In 2014, Gov. Mark Dayton worked to get rid of obsolete and unenforceable state laws, saying many were “simply ridiculous.”
The governor and the Legislature eliminated more than 1,000 statutes, including one that made carrying fruit in an illegally sized container a misdemeanor and another that outlawed driving a car in neutral.
One of the laws that Dayton initially ridiculed — outlawing wild hogs and giving the state’s agriculture commissioner the authority to hunt them down — ended up staying on the books. Lawmakers decided it was needed after all.
A handful of other unusual laws also still remain in Minnesota — including surprising local ordinances and several quirky statutes involving animals.
Counting gopher feet and keeping tires clean
A new law, added to state statutes in May, makes it illegal for landowners to eat a “nuisance” beaver that they trap because it was doing damage to their property.
If someone in Minnesota wishes to collect a bounty after killing a woodchuck or a gopher, law requires they turn in the creature’s feet to the town clerk before getting paid. This statute dates back to 1909 and once included similar rules about rattlesnakes and blackbirds.
It is still very much on the books, however. Town clerks in dozens of townships still count feet and pay out bounties. In Viola Township, residents celebrated 150 years of the annual Gopher Count this past summer.
Catching greased pigs, however, is against the law in Minnesota, due to a 1971 statute prohibiting the once-popular festival pastime. At the time, the law passed “without much public attention,” the Associated Press reported.
Since it is part of the state’s rules against animal cruelty, Minnesota Star Tribune reporter Chloe Johnson wrote last year that the law likely came about because of concern for the animals. Alternative events, like pigs racing against each other without being chased, or competitions to catch greased watermelons, have sprung up since the law was implemented.
Local ordinances also often rank among the strangest laws in the state. In Minnetonka, for example, it’s a public nuisance to drive a vehicle with dirty tires that “deposit mud, dirt, sticky substances, litter or other material on any street or highway.”
No car sales on Sunday and other ‘blue laws’
There’s an entire category of laws that seem strange now but were once very common. Called blue laws, they restrict or ban certain activities on Sundays. They were originally intended to enforce the Christian sabbath. Some date all the way back to colonial times and many gained popularity during the temperance movement.
In Minnesota, remnants of these blue laws remain part of daily life. Car dealers, for example, can’t sell a vehicle on Sunday in Minnesota. A statute from 1957 makes it a misdemeanor. Minnesota is one of only 13 states with this rule. It’s likely still around because car dealerships and employees generally support the law, according to the Minnesota Automobile Dealers Association. They have not pushed to change it.
Minnesota also remains the last state to sell 3.2 beer, which is made specifically to fit rules about alcohol sold in grocery and convenience stories.
Minnesota senior centers had their own limitations when it came to bingo. For more than three decades, games could only legally be hosted two days a week — and it was illegal for guests to join in. State lawmakers, however, lifted both restrictions in 2015 after a woman visiting her mother-in-law at a St. Paul nursing home filed a complaint to Minnesota’s Gambling Control Board.
Another of the state’s most unusual laws involves special license plates. Under certain conditions, Minnesotans caught driving under the influence are required to surrender their license plates and have them replaced with a “whiskey plate.”
Minnesota is the only state besides Ohio that requires this. While state laws about confiscating license plates have been around since the 1950s, Minnesota first created special registration plates in the 1980s.
These plates are white and always begin with the letter W (”whiskey” in the NATO phonetic alphabet). They help law enforcement officers identify drivers with a history of drunken driving.
Do you know of any other weird laws that should make this list? Send us a note at curious@startribune.com.
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