Remember awhile back I posted about ranch hands? It was stated that alot of ranchers use that road and also the girl & her family who had a stranger on their property. They have a pretty big spread. I thought I would post this it is just food for thought.
http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2006-06-18-cattle-rustlers_x.htm
Cattle rustlers a growing menace, making a fast buck on back roads of rural America
Posted 6/18/2006 3:41 AM ET
PERRY, Okla. (AP) The truck raced like a phantom down the lonesome dirt road, poking its headlights into the pre-dawn darkness and spewing blinding clouds of dust. The deputy, who was watching nearby, smelled trouble.
Todd Culp saw the mysterious truck barrel through a stop sign at 80 mph and wondered where it was rushing to at 5 a.m. The off-duty deputy gunned the engine of his unmarked green pickup in pursuit.
Culp soon noticed the truck matched the description of one involved in a recent theft and it was hauling an animal trailer. Fifteen miles later, the driver stopped on the ramp of the Cimarron Turnpike. He jumped out. The deputy was right behind him.
"Stop! Sheriff's Department. Get on the ground!" Culp barked, drawing his .45-caliber pistol. But the man ran to open the back doors of the trailer, disappeared on the side and began whooping and hollering. Out stumbled a half-dozen cows and one calf.
It was, authorities say, an awkward and belated attempt to get rid of the evidence of a crime: cattle rustling.
The era of dusty stagecoaches and wagon trains is long gone but cattle thieves the bad guys in a thousand Westerns never quite rode off into the sunset. Rustlers are now a growing menace in some parts of rural America, striking in the dead of night and sometimes selling their haul before the rancher or farmer discovers the animals are gone.
"It's a low-risk, high-reward kind of crime and people figure that out very quickly," says Joe Rector, an investigator who tools around the back roads of central Oklahoma, a Glock 9 mm pistol on his hip, caramel-colored ostrich-skin boots on his feet, a police scanner buzzing in his ear.
Millions of dollars of stolen cattle have been recovered in the last two years in Oklahoma and Texas. And in Missouri, a rash of thefts totaling more than $1 million also since 2004 recently led the governor to create a special task force as lawmakers have called for increased penalties for the culprits.
