Way back in the 1960s when I worked at a Chevy dealership we got a wrecker call to tow in a recently purchased Chevy that had hit a horse. What they neglected to mention was something we didn't find out until we got there, the car was still sitting on top of the horse. Took a while to get that car off that horse. Getting the horse off the road was somebody else's responsibility (thank God). Those are the kinds of things that make you think about another line of work, which I did.
Turns out that the mule owner's wife's grandmother said no to burying the mule on her property as well as the wife's uncle. The wife's parents, grandmother, and uncle own property contiguous to the mule owner, around 1200 acres of pasture and timber.
Don't they have dead animal services over there?---used to be trucks here that would go around picking up dead cows/pigs/horses/etc all the time. ---Their fee was reasonable at the time. --- A neighbor used them all the time and it saved him the trouble of hiring a backhoe and finding a place to dig.