Every so often I meet my neighbor (I will call him Thomas) and we catch up on local goings on. Not a Robert Frost walk the line and set the wall event but courteous enough. He hailed me as he backed his truck out his drive (I learned later he was on his way to the insurance company) and we got chatting. I mentioned I heard his chainsaw the previous day hard at work followed by a loud crash. He explained that he was taking down a rotten tree some of whose limbs had fallen on and made ineffective the electric fence which enclosed his 10+ dogs. This explained why I had seen 5 of his larger dogs sprinting around the unfenced areas of my property (and why I had cut a sturdy oak club in anticipation of a meeting). Apparently his dogs attacked and killed chicken belonging to another neighbor who had promptly called the sheriff on him. A kindly neighbor, since a few miles north another resident simply shot the offending dogs.
Thomas had (past tense) a Kubota utility atv, which is an upmarket item costing >$10k. It is usually parked in front of his house and was stolen last Saturday night when he was home. He surmises that a red pickup he noticed the previous week driving slowly up and down the public gravel road was casing the neighborhood and that they arrived in the early hours with a trailer and pushed his Kubota onto the trailer and departed. This occasioned a second meeting with the sheriff in the same week. Although it was insured there is a large deductible.
The third tidbit of information was Thomas decided to alert the neighbors to safeguard their items stored outdoors and he met with another neighbor (who also adjoins my property) who informed him that he had noticed a fox with 4 young in a den on my property. I had seen the fox on several occasions when it was eyeing my chicken and got my rooster excited, which alerted Trudy and brought us both rushing out. Now with 4 young to feed I can expect to see her more frequently – but what will happen when Trudy and I are not on hand. Thomas suggested to the neighbor (now without chicken) that the fox was to blame not his dogs, but that didn’t fly.