An alleged horse fetishist was arrested in Phoenix Friday night after flying from Pennsylvania to meet a horse owner who’d agreed to let him have sex with a miniature horse and to make sure his clothes got soaked in fragrant horse piss. But the planned romantic rendezvous was not to be: the horse owner was an undercover sheriff’s deputy conducting a sting operation.

Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio, who has a sideline in busting people on Craigslist for animal sex when he’s not harassing immigrants or angrily examining Barack Hussein Obama’s birth certificate with a loupe, said 68-year-old Michael Crawford had been into horses for years before Arpaio’s office began its sting operation against him in October 2014.

Now Maricopa County’s nine months of vigilant police work have culminated to stop an old man from bringing five shirts across the country to have a horse urinate on them “for arousal purposes.”

The deputies in the To Catch a Predator-style sting responded to Crawford’s online ad seeking horseplay, arranged a meeting with him over the phone, picked him up at the Phoenix airport, and took him to meet a volunteer’s two mini-horses before arresting him for bestiality.

Crawford told deputies he wasn’t sure why he was being arrested, considering he hadn’t actually committed any sex acts with the horses used in the sting, but deputies claim he admitted he’d been having sex with animals since 1970.

If convicted, Crawford could serve between four months and two years in prison.

Arpaio boasted the allegedly horse-fancying old man was his office’s eighth bestiality arrest in five years.

[Photos: Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office, WJAC]