Rancher Blames “Vandals” for Destroying New Outdoor Watering Complex

Kingsville, TX—Less than a month away from their much-anticipated 100th anniversary celebration and the planned unveiling of the “best outdoor watering system in Southern Texas—maybe the world” the owner of Four Sevens Ranch in South Texas woke up last week to an unexpected surprise.

After outfitting his 200,000-acre ranch with as many as eight, new, high-end automatic watering systems—costing more than $1,300 apiece—and spray painting them ‘Four Sevens’ orange in honor of the property’s upcoming anniversary bash, Charles Sheridan’s trough system “seriously screwed the pooch,” according to the rancher.

“We went down to feed the horses in the morning, and every waterer, I mean every waterer, was bright red. Like, Shining-style red—you know, the river of blood and all that. We’ve had to recruit a goldfish or two for cleaning up our old watering troughs in the past, but this was next-level.”

Sheridan got to work, trying baking soda and other natural remedies with little success. Next, the rancher resorted to draining the waterers and scrubbing them with a bleach solution, and when that failed, spend another $5,000 on a local professional cleaning company, all to no avail.

When an old-timer hand on his property told him the red algae bloom might have something to do with spray painting the waterers Four Sevens orange, Sheridan was resolute.

“There’s no other explanation for this other than it was purposefully and criminally done,” Sheridan said, adding that the culprits most likely used pig fertilizer from the ranch next door.

“Some bad hombre had to work very hard, probably in the dark of night, to create this state of affairs.”

While Sheridan, couldn’t be specific, he suggested the “vandals” might look just like what you’d expect out of a dime Western novel: black-masked ne’er-do-wells, arriving on horseback in the dead of the night, stealthily sneaking onto the ranch, armed not with Winchesters, but with tiny vials of distilled hog excrement.

According to Sheridan, this is Texas, after all.

“All I’m sayin’ is that my people are one-sixteenth McCoy on my maternal grandmother’s side, and there have been rumors for generations that there are Hatfields in this area. I’m sure they got wind of our 100th anniversary celebration, and I can only imagine they came to rain on the parade,” Sheridan insisted, without any evidence to support that theory.

In total, the rancher’s new watering complex renovation will cost Four Sevens Ranch more than $20,000—far outside their original budget—and will require the draining and cleaning of the waterers for a second time by a Dallas-based environmental cleanup firm specializing in high-tech nanobubble ozone technology.

Unfortunately, Sheridan says, this means Four Sevens Ranch will likely need to scale-back their planned 100th anniversary fireworks display to stay within the budget.

“It’s a terrible, terrible thing,” said Sheridan, who wouldn’t dismiss out of hand what he calls the use of ‘ranch justice’ in bringing the perpetrators to account. “The biggest shame is that these vandals didn’t just do it to me and the horses, they did it to the kids.”

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