Fence Snips

On Sunday Karl went to deliver and spread some manure to a close neighbors field. In so doing this he heads across our field, through a back gate, onto a small back street, crosses a main road and into the gate of the neighbors field.   He opened the back gate, left it open (no cows being in this particular field of ours) and headed to the neighbors with the tractor and tank.   He finished unloading and headed back only to find the back gate to our field closed again. 
 A different neighbor came up to him and said " yeah I had a couple of your cows come visit me.. they seems to know where they lived cause they went through your open gate and headed in the direction of your barn.  I closed the gate just in case they came back this way."  Karl was puzzled cause no cows should have been in that field - they were in the other fenced area and we had just done a perimeter check the day before to make sure all the fences were in good standing.
Karl headed back to the barn and sure enough the 2 cows that had escaped found their way back to the barn and were happily eating in the alley way.  Karl swung a gate and they happily walked around to the proper side of the gate.

I got a phone call to bring the quad so we could check out the fences again and see if something got missed.   I met Karl and we right away noticed a spot that looks like it is regularly used by someone to climb over the fence.  We found food containers (icecream) and wrap that covered a case of Gatorade.   Hmm child's play.  Nothing much to really worry about.
As you can see in the picture the wires are very bent and the brush is moved to show regular traffic.

This road used to be a dead end road and we get all kinds of interesting people parking at this corner (so sayeth the neighbor that lives across the way)  The road is still a dead end... but on the other end is a big fancy horse veterinary place and if they have their gates open you can drive through to the #10 Highway.  Well a cow can walk to the #10 Highway even IF the gate is closed.  So we kind of prefer our cows to stay behind our fence.

A little further down we came upon this... cut wires. These wires were definitely cut with snips and they were neatly bent back so that one could have a clear walk through without getting scratched.

The only wire they didn't snip was the very bottom one.. go figure!

 We are very baffled why anyone would do this.. what were they up to? Is this child's play?  Did they want to steal something?  Then we got thinking.. did they want to steal some cows?  As far as we know our head count is correct so that wasn't it.   We have no idea why....

We decided to notify the police and the constable appeared a bit baffled on why he should be aware of this.  But he dutifully took notes, checked out the area/street and agreed with our concern. 
Now the fence is fixed and a "No Trespassing" sign is posted.
We are in the process of looking for a sign that reads  "Bull on Duty - Keep out!"  or something along those lines...  Hopefully that will deter someone from cutting fences again.   And if you are reading this... there are times when we do have a bull roaming around in the pasture with the cows... we just aren't telling if its this time...