Recently the barn has been having some issues with missing feed. Since everyone is responsible for supplying their own feed this has got a lot of us up in arms. We come in the morning to flipped over feed bins, piles of feed in the aisle, and lids everywhere. You've heard the expression, "Don't come between a mother and her child," but I'd like to adjust it to say, "Don't come between a mother and her children's food because that directly affects their weight and her pocketbook, 2 things that you seriously don't want to mess with."
There were several theories and extremely heated discussions about who/what it could be and how we could stop the thief from ravaging our feed bins. The first, and least finger pointing theory was that we had a Houdini on the farm. Could it be?! One of our horses has opposable thumbs and is somehow getting out of his enclosure? If so, this same horse was so good that no one saw him and he put himself back after he was done wreaking havoc on our pony's breakfasts. Or maybe it is a ghost horse? We were postulating who it might be and how we might fix the issue. Aside from super gluing every latch shut, putting a ceiling over every pasture, and locking every gate, we were at a loss regarding how to fix this problem, if this was, indeed, the problem. I suppose we were waiting around to speak to all the horses and have one of them start the conversation off with, "Guess who has two thumbs and eats all the food in the middle of the night? THIS GUY!" Since that never happened we moved on to other theories.
As our minds ran wild they moved on to bigger and more upsetting possibilities, as minds are often want to do. Someone is taking our food. Some person is opening our buckets, taking the food out, and feeding it to their horses. Unfortunately this is all too real a possibility. Boarders are in and out of the barn at all hours. Our feed is out in the open, unguarded, unlocked, and completely helpless! We have some less than savory characters that sometimes show up (invited by boarders lacking logic and stability) who have just as much access to feed as we do. I have to admit, we got a little illogical during our tirades. Most people stealing a scoop of feed (or FIVE) aren't going to go about making it look like a horse got out. Unless, of course, this person walks around like Jack Sparrow after three too many rums and runs into things willy nillie.
The best part was, once we made it to this solution, there wasn't a whole lot of other ideas of what it could be. We were out for blood like a werewolf on a full moon night. Guesses of who did it ranged from a 7 year old kid to a 50 year old man. The speculations as to why were endless. I think most of us felt like this mystery robber had a vendetta against all five of us (because OBVIOUSLY there weren't any other common denominators at all that would allow us to draw any other conclusions). Other reasons were lack of money, to which we all argued in favor of selling said person's horse to recoup losses, the apparent con artist nature of everyone at the barn who was not us, and plain fun at watching us suffer. Despite what it may sound like now, our barn is not full of felons and serial killers. I promise.
Like I said, at this point we had given up on the other possibilities and were now honing in on, what we knew, had to be the culprit. So we decided to take it upon ourselves to bring the bandit to light. Our first thought, stake out. Yeah. It had gotten to the point where we were willing to stay outside, all night, hidden and quiet, in the cold and, in some cases, rain, to catch and then subsequently shame and evict the bad guy. We had it half planned out in 3 minutes flat. Parking the cars behind the house or even at the gas station down the road and walking in. Staking out in an empty stall or the tack room. All of us in black. No one really thought about the fact that 4-5 girls were involved. This implies a lot of giggling, not a lot of paying attention, perhaps some shrieking (we would be outside with bugs and shadows and other anti-girly things), and definitely not a lot of mettle to back up our anger. Oh yeah, and big girl jobs.
Someone must've thought about at least one of those things and how a stake out was probably our least likely way of catching any culprits. I'm guessing it was a husband or boyfriend who thought it out because along with the rain they provided over our parade, they offered a more ideal solution. Game cam (and we wanted to do it the hard way!). Put it up when no one was out there, don't tell anyone, hide it well and give it a few days. It was ingenious, and unfortunately not my idea.
We never made it that far. As I walked up to talk to Maggie about this awful situation and our solution, another boarder walked up and described the gigantic raccoon tracks he has been seeing in the mud. What?! Raccoons?! No. Definitely no. I was indignant. Doesn't this guy know someone is STEALING feed. The nerve of him to blame these incidents on some poor, small, starving raccoon. But then the stories started coming out of the woodwork. 3-4 coons at a time, an ambush, a planned attack. Opposable thumbs were the culprit. Some of these stories were coming from people we may or may not have pointed fingers at. To which our response was, "Suuuuuuuuure. A Likely story. Convenient isn't it, this raccoon story you've been spreading."
While a horse or two did end up getting out, and we haven't entirely ruled out a legitimate thief, we do think we've found the actual problem. No, we haven't purchased a game camera but it is next on the list if we are given any reason to think coons aren't the true culprit. One of our ranks has made a personal sighting of a baby grizzly bear sized coon so we are more convinced. Right now we are fighting fire with... well, bungee cords. On everything. Unfortunately raccoons are a tad smarter than we tend to give them credit for and it's only a matter of time before they figure out how the cords work.
Although we were gung ho about a stake out when we thought we'd catch a 2 legged raccoon, we can be just as gung ho for a stake out with rifles for real raccoons. Although a stake out for raccoons of the size we are talking about might end in a weird wrestling match with the raccoons grabbing us each in a choke hold and making us tap out, thus forcing us to buy feed to forever appease our captors. What I'm saying is, we don't really have a solid plan of attack, just a lot of pent up frustration and less feed per dollar. I think we are planning on riding out the bungee cords until the coons figure them out and then stepping up our game. This is war, so let the battles begin.
No comments:
Post a Comment