About a month ago we had an incident at home.
Dusty always feeds the horses in the morning before work. Since we feed in the pasture and Pete gets only 1 lb versus Gem’s 3 lbs, whoever feeds stands between the two until they are finished. Otherwise Pete would gobble his and half of Gem’s too.
He fed that morning no issue.
I always feed in the evening. I grabbed the grain and headed out to the pasture like every other morning. As I was standing there, after completing the scratching ritual for both spoiled brats, I looked over and saw this:
Tire tracks. Leading out past the shelter. Inside my pasture fence. Well, crap.
My gut reaction was “WTH is our landlady doing inside my pasture?! Doesn’t she know the liability if one of them got out? We live on the corner of two busy roads.”
Of course it was 6 pm at this point and the rental office was closed. There wasn’t much we could do as neither of us wanted to call the cops on the landlady.
I sent the Hubby to Tractor Supply to get a heavy duty padlock for the gate. If someone wanted in again, they’d need a bolt cutter.
As soon as the rental company opened the next morning I was on the phone explaining the situation. Landlady is often seen mowing around our fence line and driveway so she was the obvious suspect. They contacted her and she called Hubby.
It wasn’t her.
Double crap.
Now my mind was wheeling. The only reason some unauthorized person would drive down my private driveway and through my closed gate with a truck would be to steal my horses. I couldn’t think of any other explanation.
Thankfully my horses aren’t friendly to strangers. Pete never did let the BM we boarded at for over a year touch him and barely put up with the last lady. Gem stays clear on the principal that she is better than anyone else and nobody has the right to be near her.
I’m thinking they entered, tried to wrangle up the horses who just ran away from them and gave up.
Scary doesn’t begin to describe it.
The cops were useless. With nothing broken, stolen or harmed all we had was a tire track in the mud and a gate that looked undisturbed. Apparently they only use plaster to make a mold of tire tracks and compare to known makes/models that use that tire on TV. CSI our local police force is not.
Thankfully no new evidence of trespassing has been seen since. Either the padlock is doing its job, beyond making life harder when trying to get in the pasture with grain and/or hay loaded hands, or they gave up since the horses weren’t cooperating. Either way my heart was in my chest for about a month.
The Roaming Rider 