Oklahoma’s Strange Law About The Burial Of Dead Limbs

I went looking for some weird Oklahoma laws, because you know there's got to be a few things in that giant book of rules that make you wonder what in the world happened.

And I don't mean the usual internet list of laws that supposedly make it illegal to wear boots to bed or make an ugly face at a dog. Those things get repeated so often that people start believing them, but finding an actual law on the books is a different story.

So I started digging around in the real Oklahoma statutes, and I found a chapter dealing with dead bodies and burial. That's already a pretty interesting place to end up when you're just looking for something to write about.

One of the entries is titled "Burial of Dead Limbs."

Yes. That's an actual heading in Oklahoma's laws.

Oklahoma's “Burial of Dead Limbs” Law

Oklahoma Statute Title 21, Section 1157, says the same laws requiring a dead body to be buried, and protecting it from interference or injury, also apply to a human limb or body part separated from someone during their lifetime. The wording goes back to the Revised Laws of 1910, so this isn't some new rule that popped up in the age of the internet.

There's another law in that same chapter that gives a little extra vibe... Section 1151 says people have the right to direct what happens to their bodies after death, along with what happens to any part of their body separated during their lifetime. The law also allows people to assign certain decisions about their remains to someone else through a sworn affidavit.

Now, before you start wondering what kind of trouble somebody got into with a severed arm, there's a reason laws like this exist. The statute sits in a chapter dealing with the handling, burial, and disposition of human remains. It's not some random rule that a lawmaker dreamed up after a particularly strange weekend.

Oklahoma Farming Was Changing After Statehood

If you look at the wider context and the period of time Oklahoma was in just after statehood, two things were happening at that time that were putting lives and limbs at risk.

The oil boom, for one, but mechanized farming was undergoing a huge evolution at the time to more modern machines.

Drilling and processing oil has always been super dangerous, but farming even more so. Instead of gentle, slow-moving steam-operated engines, the new and raw power of gasoline and kerosene was being unleashed on the farm.

Big mechanical moving parts + soft fleshy bodies = death and dismemberment. I know my own family had tragedy strike with small mistakes on the farm. I'm sure every big agricultural family in the Sooner State has a story to tell about that.

Perhaps this law was written to amend the then burial laws to ensure a person's limbs deserved the same respect as the rest of a person's body, but that's just a guess.

Like all of Oklahoma's super weird laws, they served a very specific purpose for a very specific problem in the era they were written... But as the larger issues got solved, nobody thought to clean up the little odd pieces of legislation like this.

All the same, I can't see burger theft being that big of a problem at any point in time.