The Accidental Smallholder Forum
Community => Coffee Lounge => Topic started by: arobwk on January 04, 2019, 02:32:29 pm
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DavidandCollette mentioned loss of old Kubota tractor on SiN’s “What tractor do you have ...” thread.
I’m interesting in hearing about others’ experiences as regards theft (equipment, materials or live-stock).
I might expand this Rural crime thread/theme idc, but for now, I’m just interested in the details of any other members’ experiences of thievery from their small-holdings.
E.g. - what was stolen; was it worth much; was it locked up and where/how; was it stolen under your nose (i.e. do you live on your small-holding); did you have alarms, cctv etc; and so on ...
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I've had fuel stolen from the tractor tank, knew the offender who later in the year dealt with by HMRC. small tools a diesel injector pressure tester,food from outside freezer house , haylage and straw, apart from the last two all locked up. But the amount of visitors " we're lost" but have a need to look around along with the Caravan Utilizing Nomadic Travelers who were quite blatent in searching around, when challenged "we're looking for scrap , thats a nice dug sir , whats the weight of the tractor " etc etc .
So we invested in CCTV with anpr capability, motion detection, this has proven to be an eye opener, even some delivery people like a good nose about. The CCTV is quite overt and its effectiveness is well known as some have found out. :innocent: .
I think if its well known that you have security,especially big black angry dogs it helps deterring the unwanted.
Sporadic gunfire appears to help too !
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We're not too bad here, I suppose because everybody knows everybody so if there are strangers roaming about on the sniff for stuff, word gets round very fast. The only problem we do have is heating oil theft. Everybody knows who takes it (people have been known to greet them with 'How's the oil business going?' and get a cheery, 'Fine, thanks!' in return), but they've never been caught at it yet. I've not had my tank emptied in 10 years of living here, though a couple of neighbours have been done.
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One of our reasons for leaving England (Staffordshire) was the staggering level of theft. Initially it was a row of leeks, but then escalated.
The first thing was our rotorvator, which wasn't locked up but well buried amongst other stuff. I noticed a week earlier that things may have been moved slightly, as if someone was nosing about, but the area seemed secure with only one gravel drive entrance between houses and the machine was very heavy. It was the only theft we bothered to report and it was found by a school caretaker about a mile away, dumped in a hedgerow.
Our small petrol lawnmower was taken. It was in a locked shed, the door of which was smashed to bypass the heavy-duty padlock. They forgot to take the grass box, which I then removed and someone definitely came back the next night, presumably to collect it.
The list of minor stuff taken is ridiculous. Two antique doors, 5 railway sleepers, 100 concrete blocks, the entire crop of fruit (apples, pears, plums), fruit canes, compost (the piles in the garden)- that's what I can remember! Didn't report any of them as I was advised the information can be accessed and would obstruct the sale of our house. At some stage someone tried to dismantle one of the chicken coops which, fortunately, was unoccupied.
One neighbour had a £100 padlock and chain stolen. He left it on the gate and was away just 5 minutes, but the crazy thing was the padlock was clipped shut and there was no key!
All this rendered the whole smallholding exercise pointless for us. We spent a great deal of our time unlocking and locking padlocks! We have a box full of them in the garage, now unused.
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Compost!?!? Seriously!? :o
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I've had fuel stolen from the tractor tank, knew the offender who later in the year dealt with by HMRC. small tools a diesel injector pressure tester,food from outside freezer house , haylage and straw, apart from the last two all locked up. But the amount of visitors " we're lost" but have a need to look around along with the Caravan Utilizing Nomadic Travelers who were quite blatent in searching around, when challenged "we're looking for scrap , thats a nice dug sir , whats the weight of the tractor " etc etc .
So we invested in CCTV with anpr capability, motion detection, this has proven to be an eye opener, even some delivery people like a good nose about. The CCTV is quite overt and its effectiveness is well known as some have found out. :innocent: .
I think if its well known that you have security,especially big black angry dogs it helps deterring the unwanted.
Sporadic gunfire appears to help too !
Not happened to me yet, but I know other folk who have received the "we're lost" response when intruders were found checking things out!
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Take care of information you give out. Someone we know recently advertised a machine on gumtree and that very night a thief attempted to break into his storage area. Apparently they had found his address by interrogating the mobile phone pic he had used for the advert to find his GPS position. It sounds fantastical to me but maybe it can be done :thinking:
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Reality is that a determined thief will succeed and so will an uncaring tow-rag. CCTV proved useless when i was in London. When the perpetrators showed faces to the CCTV then Police still couldn't be bothered to try and identify them and mostly they wore hoodies anyway. Simple smash and enter was their way to go but it takes little more determination to appear with a petrol driven disc cutter and render most defences useless.
A cross bow or shotgun and claim that you were in fear of your life is likely the way to go
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Reality is that a determined thief will succeed and so will an uncaring tow-rag. .....
You are almost certainly right pgkevet. However:
I obviously tempted fate with this thread. I've experienced another attempted break-in at home (i.e. not on my bit of land). As reported on another thread, the garden shed has been checked-out recently, but now someone is testing the house defences also: lower ground-floor door lock/s have been "tested" with a screw-driver (or some such tool). They didn't get in.
I'm not absolutely sure whether it was night-time or day-time attempt: I only noticed the door damage when returning from a day-time trip out, but might have been there when I went out and I just didn't register.
Some little sh*t is, it would seem, checking me out: so far without much success, but obviously I'm starting to think about upping house security.
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I find reading this thread really quite sad.
I guess I am just old fashioned, maybe with rose-tinted glasses or whatever, but I still like to think that (nearly) everyone is nice. The problem nowadays is that there seems to be an ever degrading lack of respect for other people generally. Sad times.
I still live by the ethic that we should treat others as we expect to be treated ourselves.
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Cool. Since after reading this thread I expect to have my tractor nicked* does that mean I can come round and steal yours? ;D
* Note to wouldbe thieves reading this thread - I don't own a tractor#
# Unless I pay Maysie a visit first of course.
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No tractor here either.....
:thumbsup:
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Somebody else got there before me, I see >:( .
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are geese as good guards as I've been led to believe? And do they perform as deterrents or alarms or other?
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My first experience of geese was being chased by a flock of them when I was collecting ponies from a field and got too near the house next door. I've avoided geese ever since and if I ever considered robbing someone, geese would definitely deter me.
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I hate geese!
I was chased by one when I was 4 - went with my Granda to deliver ice cream to a hotel in Grantown and they left me outsude playing with the chickens while they had a cuppa. Heard me screaming and rushed out. I have NEVER forgotten my Granda's laughter to this day 71 years later. The irony is that I did forget all of it immediately after childbirth when I called my daughter the same name as the goose - Sarah. :innocent: :innocent: :innocent: :rant: :rant: :rant:
Did I say I hate geese?
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are geese as good guards as I've been led to believe? And do they perform as deterrents or alarms or other?
No! Our ganders will go for people when their geese are sitting, but otherwise they are fairly gentle souls. They do make a lot of noise sometimes, but as we have never had intruders we don't know if they would make a different racket for them. They sleep inside so would only be on patrol in daylight hours.
We rely on the dogs and whopping big padlocks and the like. Anyway, we don't have much to steal - it's all second or fifth hand.
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A question wrt to "guard-geese": are they a match for foxes or are they just nice and large target prey?
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Geese seem to take it in turns to chase something off. If they would only band together they could give a fox a pretty good duffing, but their little brains don't seem to work that way.
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A question wrt to "guard-geese": are they a match for foxes or are they just nice and large target prey?
Most likely just nice target prey I think…. but mine live behind an electric fence, as I'd rather not give the fox (or badger) a chance…
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Geese seem to take it in turns to chase something off. If they would only band together they could give a fox a pretty good duffing, but their little brains don't seem to work that way.
The ones who chased me weren't doing it in turns. There must have been hundreds. Well, probably 20 but I was 15 at the time so prone to exaggeration.