“There I stood, completely perplexed. The tears overcame me at that moment.” Pigeon fancier Tinus Deuring from Gasselternijveen opened the door of the pigeon loft this morning and was shocked. “Everything was gone at once. All my performance pigeons.” The twenty most valuable pigeons are gone. Along with the eggs.
Deuring is in the dark. There are no traces of forced entry at the loft, he did not hear anything at night, but according to Deuring it cannot be otherwise than a targeted burglary. An intruder seemed to know what he was doing. The best and most expensive pigeons from Deuring are gone. There are still traces of blood in the cage. He doesn’t know whether they belong to the thieves or the pigeons.
So an empty cage. “I don’t know what I thought,” says Deuring. “It might be better not to say that now. But I can say that I am very, very, very shocked. I haven’t really noticed that they are gone yet.”
The pigeon fancier has had pigeons for over sixty years and in all that time he has never experienced this. According to him, the pigeons that have now been stolen have been worked on for about ten to twenty years. Consider, for example, breeding and training.
These animals were specialized in flying distances of 500 to 750 kilometers. He regularly won prizes. “Then you can see that if you are one of the best in the Netherlands, they are good pigeons.”
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