One of the first ponies.

Another early Pearl Bakery pony and a friend.

Another early horse - notice there are 2 wires now.

And then there were none.

This is a special one - someone brought her water. There is a famous kid's story about her - Misty of Chincoteague, written by Marguerite Henry - check it out at the library!

I decided to try a heavy duty wire on this horse. It didn't slow the bad guys down much.

These are actually 2 different horses - Kim put one out in the afternoon, which was taken quickly, the other later that night - I came by and took pictures later in both cases. The empty wires are starting to look ridiculous.

We tried replacing them quickly, but they were stolen almost as quickly.

Again....

And again...

and again. We put this one on so quickly, the horse wasn't even really attached. You can see that the loop around the ring is only thru the extra bit of the tie, so I added another cable tie to attach it more firmly.

It didn't make any difference though - he still disappeared.

Kim wrote an open letter to the horse thief. It said:

Dear Horse Thief:

Over a dozen horses have been placed at this location, and they are all removed within 24 hours. We suspect it's the same person who is doing this as well as removing other horses in the area.

What gives?

By removing the horse you are depriving both children and adults of the joy of spotting this horse and noticing part of their city's history.

No amount of pleasure you get by stealing our horse could offset the joy you are taking away from the community as a whole. Further, if you're walking around with a tool capable of cutting wire rope, I'm going to venture a guess that you can afford to walk into a Dollar Tree store and buy your own horse.

So please do, because installing these horses, including hardware costs us nearly $3 a horse.

Personally, I'm a student who is not working, so this is a big sacrifice for me. A sacrifice that I'm willing to make to benefit the whole community but not to benefit you personally. In this last case I used my birthday money. So you should feel pretty bad about your actions.

So please leave our horses alone.

Thank you.

Kim

This letter seemed to make a difference - the horse remained for several days. But eventually and yet again, the bad guys got him and the letter. Maybe the thief can't read and stole the letter so that someone could read it to him. I hope it will make a difference. Maybe he's thinking about getting some good Karma back. One way to do that would be to put those stolen horses out about town again. I'm hoping that some of the horses I've seen lately that are otherwise unaccounted for, are being put out by the (hopefully reformed) thief. Wouldn't that be great?

Anyway, that is the story of the Pearl Bakery Horses. I hope that we can keep a horse there in the future. You can help by watching for those bad guys and asking them why they keep stealing the horses. We'd really like to know.

Update -January 07: The thefts seem to have decreased and one horse stuck around for several months. It was replaced on 01/01/07 with this special edition horse:

Isn't he beautiful? I hope he'll be around for a good long time.