What the heck is going on?

[Jim Dye]

O.K. Here is a weird one for you guys.

I was out in my yard this evening, doing some spring yardwork when I came upon a strange find. There was about a pound of raw cubed meat, probably steak, scattered along one side of my house all the way along the fence to the back of my property. Weird, huh? First I though it was an animal who may have gotten in some garbage, but an animal would have eaten the meat. This looked like fresh raw beef. It was starting to attract ants. I picked it all up and threw it out.

What is going on here? Is someone trying to poison my dog and cat? Is there some neighbor doing a meat ritual by my house? Did it drop out of a plane passing overhead? Any ideas?

[rostasi]

How well do you get along with your neighbors?

All in a line would seem to scream human.

[Son-of-a-Weizen]

Since it's uniform sized chunks spread out in a non-random fashion, you should have taken a photo of it and at least saved a piece or two for testing. Got a shotgun handy?

Edited April 17, 2005 by Son-of-a-Weizen

[Big Wheel]

Do your neighbors have small children? Perhaps someone was grilling, left the meat unattended, and the kids decided to have some fun playing with the squishy building blocks that Dad left on the table...stupid, I know, but seems as good a guess as any! The fact that the meat was placed sometime around dinnertime seems to suggest that it was originally intended to be eaten. Was the weather nice enough to grill outside this evening?

Edited April 17, 2005 by Big Wheel

[Big Wheel]

BTW, I think Spontaneous Meat Generation would be a really good name for a band.

Some more thoughts: If I was a disgruntled neighbor wanting to do something nasty to your pets, I probably wouldn't bother putting the meat in a straight line. Even if the fence barred my entry onto your property, I'd probably just chuck the meat into your yard, over the fence, rather than meticulously place it along the fence line. As Rod noted, meat in a line would be a dead giveaway. Also, I would use chicken or tuna fish, not beef. A pound of cubed beef costs probably two or three times the equivalent amount of chicken. But maybe your neighbor is just dumber or more wasteful than I am.

On second thought, I think I'd be more likely to use beef if I wanted to hurt your dog, tuna if I wanted to do something to your cat. I've never seen a house cat eat beef, though I don't see an obvious reason why they wouldn't. Does your dog bark a lot, and do you leave it outside when you're gone? That would seem to me to be the most obvious reason for some asshole wanting to do this. A friend of my family is a paramedic who once lived next door to a woman with an incessantly yapping dog that she always put outside when she left. Only after REPEATED requests for her to take her dog inside were met with the denial that the dog was ever noisy did our friend decide to take matters into his own hands. Whenever the dog was howling enough to drive a person crazy, he would take some ground beef and conceal one of his paramedic's Benadryl pills in it, then toss it over the fence. The dog would be knocked out like a light. He claimed it never caused lasting harm to the animal, and that it eventually came to eagerly expect these little meat+sedative treats.

Edited April 17, 2005 by Big Wheel

[Guest Chaney]

Has your neighborhood suddenly become very still?

Have the birds stopped chirping, the neighborhood kids stopped making noise, all traffic stopped?

Is your television receiving only static?

Is the phone dead?

I've seen this happen before.

I'm guessing that, except for you and your family, all life in your area has ended.

You will now be beset upon by flesh eating zombies.

Trust me: the basement is the only safe place.

[rostasi]

What? You mean:

The Stepford BBQers!

Edited April 17, 2005 by rostasi

[Jazzmoose]

I got as far a "raw, cubed meat" and "do you have pets?" popped into my head, so I would guess you've got a pet poisoner on your hands. Should have frozen the stuff to force feed the culprit when you figure out who it is...

[Jim Dye]

A couple more things...

Our dog is mostly an inside dog. She's only out for a few minutes at a time to go to the bathroom unless we are with her. She's not much of a yapper. We have a 6' wooden privacy fence in our back yard.

The meat wasn't in a straight line. It looks like it was just tossed on the ground in a random fashion, maybe as someone walked the property line between our house and the neighbors house. It wasn't perfectly cubed either. Just chopped up in fairly uniform pieces like you would do when making a stew.

Weird!

[Free For All]

The meat wasn't in a straight line. It looks like it was just tossed on the ground in a random fashion, maybe as someone walked the property line between our house and the neighbors house. It wasn't perfectly cubed either. Just chopped up in fairly uniform pieces like you would do when making a stew.

Sounds to me like a drive-by meating.

Doesn't seem like anyone has a beef with you.

Of course your piece of mind is at steak, but I wouldn't stew over it.

I've heard of "ground" beef, but this is something else entirely.

Done for now. Next.

[JSngry]

It's voodoo.

[Jim R]

I don't know what's so weird about it. There was probably a fondue party going on in the cockpit of a helicopter that flew over your house, and the pilot just tilted the craft a little too quickly as he made a turn. Go out and look around for some fondue skewers (hopefully none of the passengers fell out ).

Pet poisoning was the first thing that came to mind for me also. However, I've never heard about somebody doing it that way. It IS weird...