I can finally talk about this: part 2 - the animals on the road

One of the biggest problems that I had with my neighbor was the constant complaints to animal control about my animals being out on the county road, and a couple of blog readers have asked 1) if there were animals on the road, and 2) how they got on the road.  I'm going to talk about that in this post.

Everything happened within a few feet of my gates - sometimes 5 feet, sometimes 20 feet.  At no point were any of the animals more than 30 feet from my property in any of the photos.  

The picture above shows my farm (on the right side of the photos) and Ms. sheltons mobile home (in the center top).  The colored dots are where pigs are in the photos.  All of the pigs  are pictured right next to my house, hundreds of feet from everyone elses house.  Right where two of my gates meet the road.  Here's the photos used in evidence for the charges

You can click on any of these photos to see a larger version

All of the photos were taken by Dale Shelton - she testified that in court.  She testified that the time and date stamps were correct.   Most of the pictures show her sitting in her car when the picture is taken.  None of the pictures show my gates or my fence.

Pictures are hard to argue with - clearly there are pigs in the road.  But there's some funny business about this pictures, and with my neighbor.

Think about this:  If she's concerned about pigs in the road, she could just call me, or get out of her car and walk 20 feet to my front door, and reasonably expect that I would take care of the situation right there.  With the pigs out, I could then immediately have the best chance of figuring out how they got out - pigs like to go back into the same area they came out of, so if you want to know how a pig got somewhere just chase it a little and it'll show you.

But Ms. Shelton wouldn't notify me, or call animal control.  She'd take these photos and then keep them for a few weeks or a month; she testified to this.  After waiting a few weeks she'd send them to animal control, who would wait a few more weeks, and then issue me a notice of violation.

What this meant is that I didn't get any indication that the animals were out until 4 to 8 weeks after the fact, and that "notice" would come with a $200 fine, which Ms. Shelton was probably overjoyed about.

I would then be in the position of trying to figure out what happened a month or two ago - did someone leave the gate open?  Is there a hole in the fence?  Are these even my pigs - could they be the neighbors? 

I'd like you to think about what you ate for lunch 6 weeks ago.  It was like that for me trying to figure out why these animals were out.  What was I doing on august 11th I'd think - on october 15!

Meanwhile the fines kept piling up.  All in all Ms. Shelton cost me over $1000 in fines to animal control.

Next:  How I think that the animals were getting out