State: Minnesota · Statute: Minn. Stat. §343.36 · Filed by The Bureau of Real Laws
"It is illegal to grease a pig in Minnesota." This one shows up on every weird-law roundup, usually wedged between obvious fabrications — which is a shame, because it's the rare list entry that survives a trip to the actual law books. It's also not quite what the law says. The truth is better.
Minnesota Statutes §343.36, titled "Greased Pig Contests and Turkey Scrambles," reads in full:
"No person shall operate, run or participate in a contest, game, or other like activity, in which a pig, greased, oiled or otherwise, is released and wherein the object is the capture of the pig, or in which a chicken or turkey is released or thrown into the air and wherein the object is the capture of the chicken or turkey. Any violation of this section is a misdemeanor."
Read it carefully, because the drafting is doing sly work. The crime is not grease. Nothing in §343.36 stops you from oiling up a pig in the privacy of your own barn; the state of Minnesota is not running a pig-friction inspection service. The crime is the contest: releasing a pig — "greased, oiled or otherwise" — so that people can chase and capture it. That little phrase "or otherwise" means even an ungreased pig scramble counts. The grease was always beside the point; the chase is the offense.
And the net is cast wide. It covers anyone who operates or runs the event and anyone who participates in it. The organizer, the announcer, and the uncle who dove face-first into the mud are all equally guilty. Chickens get protection too: releasing one, or throwing one into the air, for capture is equally banned. Turkey scrambles — a once-common fair and radio-promotion stunt in which live turkeys were tossed and caught for prizes — are named in the section's title and buried in its text.
Section 343.36 was enacted in 1971 (Laws 1971, chapter 649, §1) and amended in 1981 (chapter 53, §15). Crucially, it lives in Chapter 343, Minnesota's animal-cruelty code, "Prevention of Cruelty to Animals" — sandwiched among provisions about tormenting, depriving, and abandoning animals. That placement tells you what the legislature thought it was doing. This was not the fun police raiding the county fair. Greased pig contests were a rural fair staple in which a terrified animal got chased, grabbed by the ears and legs, and tackled by a crowd, to general amusement. Animal-welfare advocates of the era argued the animal's experience of the event was somewhat less charming than the crowd's, and Minnesota's lawmakers agreed — as part of the same early-1970s wave of cruelty-law reform that produced much of the modern Chapter 343.
Nor is this a dead-letter relic nobody has bothered to repeal. Section 343.36 appears, unchanged, in current editions of the Minnesota Statutes, including the 2025 statutes. A violation is a misdemeanor, the same as it was in 1971.
REAL — completely, currently, and citable down to the subsection. The popular claim garbles it slightly (the grease is legal; the contest is not), but Minnesota's ban on greased pig contests and turkey scrambles is exactly the kind of law the Bureau wishes every list-maker would bother to look up before printing. One sentence of statute, zero ambiguity, and an entire category of county-fair chaos retired by the phrase "or otherwise."
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