MIAMI BEACH, Fla. – Two recent incidents where women rode a white horse inside Miami Beach nightclubs appeared to be trying recreate to a famous stunt at New York's Studio 54 in 1977.
Bianca Jagger, then-wife of Rolling Stones singer Mick Jagger, was photographed on a top of white horse while celebrating her 30th birthday with celebrities such as Andy Warhol and Liza Minnelli.
The photos of Bianca Jagger on the horse appeared in newspapers across the globe, cementing the disco hotspot's over-the-top, anything goes reputation.
Forty years later, the stunt is getting a much different reaction.
"What kind of idiot would do something like to this to an animal? What kind of idiot would endanger people's lives?" Miami Beach Mayor Dan Gelber said.
The city of Miami Beach revoked the license of the Mokai Lounge Friday after videos emerged on social media of a bikini-clad woman struggling to ride a white horse onto the dance floor. In the video, the horse is visible scared and falls to the floor at one point.
A second set of pictures show another woman riding a white horse at another South Beach club, Kiki on the River. The woman is wearing a red dress and a hairstyle similar to Bianca Jagger's look in 1977.
Animal-rights activists roundly condemned the Miami Beach stunts.
"This is 2018, not Studio 54, and we know that horses are skittish animals who don't belong among the pounding music, shouting crowds, and flashing lights of a nightclub," People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals said in a statement.
But even the Studio 54 stunt wasn't without criticism. Photographer Rose Hartman told the New York Post in 2016 that she believed the horse had been drugged before it entered the nightclub, which could hold up to 3,000 people.
Bianca Jagger, now an animal rights activist, has said she regrets the incident and said the often-told story that she rode the horse into the club is not true.
"It was a beautiful white horse that reminded me of mine," she wrote in a 2015 letter to the Financial Times, "and I made the foolish decision to get on it for a few minutes … No doubt you will agree with me that it is one thing to, on the spur of the moment, to get on a horse in a nightclub, but it is quite another to ride in on one."