Abused horse owner: Enough with the jokes!

by Brian McKim & Traci Skene on November 5th, 2009

The article that is rocketing around the WWW, today’s offbeat news nugget, is about the guy in South Carolina, Rodell Vereen, who got caught (on videotape!) “abusing” a horse… for the second time!

Listen to Barbara Kenley, the owner of the horse, who says she wished that Vereen had gotten more jail time, then follows that up with this:

“I’ve been through hell for the last year and it’s caused a lot of hardship,” Kenley told the newspaper. “There’s a lot of ridicule and jokes going around about this thing. And a person can only take so much.”

To which we must ask: Which person? Kenley? The Horse Whisperer? Who are the jokes about? Why is Kenley so upset about the jokes? Who is the victim here? (We figure it’s Sugar, the 21-year-old horse that’s been repeatedly diddled! Can you imagine the jokes that Sugar is hearing from the other horses? We’d like to be a fly on a pile of manure in that barn!)

Fie on him who arbitrarily claims that this story is off-limits to comedians! (We can just hear some folks saying that any joke about the SC dude who likes to bang horses is “auto-hackery!”) The jokes are a force of nature! They can’t be stopped! It’s human nature to mock inhuman nature! One of the functions of the comedian (amateur or otherwise) is to marginalize the perv. (Really, if we can’t call a guy who gets busy with a horse a pervert, then who can we call a pervert?!)