Collingwood holiday-home ram-pager exposed
Rams can turn bad in the breeding season. Photo: Gerard Hindmarsh.
A puzzling case in The GB Weekly Police Report of 29 April, relating to a holiday home in Collingwood that had several windows smashed since the owners stayed there in February--has been solved. And it did not involve a human offender.
A large amount of blood was left at that scene, and the Takaka police appealed for information about a possible offender with cuts to their lower limbs, likely needing medical attention.
Returning owners Peter Barker and Prue Angell, who normally reside in Paekakariki on the Kapiti Coast, called the police when they discovered the apparent “vandalism” at their property, located just beyond Beach Road towards Milnthorpe. No attempt at actual entry had been made, which made the damage all the more of a mystery.
Senior sergeant Arthur Clarence attended the “crime scene” and took blood samples from around the three broken, floor-positioned safety-glass panes for DNA testing. But the first real clue for Peter and Prue came in the form of a discernible dollop of sheep’s dropping left at the scene.
Enquiries around Collingwood revealed that on Thursday 10 March a large and testy sheep had “ram”paged through the house of Des and Sue Clark on Beach Road. Sue had been in the lounge that afternoon when she heard the distinctive sound of hooves on their deck and spied a large ram, already with a discernibly bloodied nose.
The visitor wasn’t a complete surprise to her. Just a few hours earlier she had been notified by a local sheep owner that he’d lost a couple of sheep from the nearby paddock while trying to load them onto his truck.
Sue rushed out and opened the gate to the neighbouring paddock with a view to chasing the animal back in, but while she was occupied, the ram took the opportunity to enter her house through the front door she’d inadvertently left open.
“I’ve never had a ram inside before,” said Sue, “and I never want to again. He looked like he wanted to bunt me. It was scary.”
She managed to get the ram outside, but he returned via the open laundry door and headed upstairs where Sue found him in the spare room, defiantly atop the bed and all her newly folded washing! From here he leaped off, headed into their bedroom and jumped up by their bay window.
“I don’t know if he felt trapped or saw his own reflection, but he reared up on his back legs and crashed through the window, spraying glass everywhere.” This gave the ram access to the top of the veranda and main roof, where it charged around, dripping blood as it went.
At this point the farmer, who had been driving back and forth looking for his sheep, turned up and said to Sue: “Do you know you have a sheep on your roof?” He chased it around and tried to tackle it but it evaded capture. Finally the ram was persuaded to go back through the window.
“He trotted proudly back down the passage and out the laundry door and through the gate of the paddock which we promptly shut,” said Sue. “It took a good hour-and-a-half to wash all the blood off the roof where the ram had been. The man at State Insurance laughed so much when I lodged my claim that he forgot to read out the bit about telling the truth. I guess he thought that no one could make up a story like that!”
David and Mary Taylor at the Rosy Glow Chocolate House just along the road were also visited by the ram that day, but had managed to shoo it away without incident.
The offending ram has now been banished to a safe paddock at Tukurua.
Sergeant Arthur Clarence said rams, particularly in the breeding season, have been known to cause havoc, and can smash windows when they see their reflection, thinking it’s another challenging ram.
It certainly seems this could be just a copycat crime: a similar incident several years ago saw four lower panes at the entrance to Tukurua Gallery smashed by an escaped local ram, which objected to seeing its reflection in the windows one after another. It evaded capture and had to be shot.
Gerard Hindmarsh
