Threatened suit alters 'possum drop'

CHARLOTTE, N.C. -- A threatened lawsuit over a live "possum drop" to ring in New Year's prompted folks in a mountain town known as the "Opossum Capital of the World" to roll over and use a roadkill replacement.

But Brasstown isn't ready to give up on its proudest local tradition.

"We're not optimistic or pessimistic -- we're opossumistic," chief possum drop organizer Clay Logan said Friday from his corner store and gas station.

Since 1991, Logan and his friends in the town of 240 have lowered a caged possum from the roof of the gas station at the stroke of midnight on New Year's Eve. In recent years, the event has drawn several hundred possum partisans.

But after The New York Times ran a story about the tradition Wednesday, Logan said he got a call from someone purporting to represent the group People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals and threatening a lawsuit.

Worried at the prospect of oppressive opossum litigation, Logan decided to ring in 2004 with roadkill.

Moving with a speed rarely seen in his favorite animal (possums top out at about 7 mph), Logan and some friends procured a dead possum just in time for the celebration.

"You know, you've just got to adjust to things in life," he said Friday. However, he added, "Some of the people was a little disappointed" at having a dead possum drop.

Logan -- who sells various possum-related souvenirs at his store and Web site -- vowed to regroup and consider all possibilities for future drops.

"We've got a year to adjust," he declared, in between taking orders for a videotape of this year's festivities, which included a "Miss Possum Drop" pageant. "We're going to study the options. ... We'll get the Saturday morning breakfast boys together and figure it out."

One option is a return to a live possum drop, Logan said, arguing that the animals used for the tradition get to lead pretty cushy lives -- for possums.

"He has a better life with us than he has out in the wild -- and we turn them loose," he said.

PETA is ready for a fight on the issue. Amy Rhodes, a senior animals and entertainment specialist with the Virginia-based group, said Friday that the organization believes Logan's stunt violates local, state and federal laws that prohibit cruelty to animals and govern conditions under which animals may be taken from the wild and released back into it.

"It sounds like some hare-brained idea that he came up with," Rhodes said. "It's ridiculous. It's extremely stressful for the animals."

Logan sounded surprised that it had taken more than a decade for someone to get upset about the possum drop.

"I figured that sooner or later it was going to be a problem," he said.

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