Definitely a strange theft. 20 miles of sausage skins. Hmmm… what would you need with 20 miles of sausage skins?
The West Australian 21 Mar 1935
http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article32838783
A butcher, of course, would find a use for them but he would have to be a pretty popular butcher if he was expecting to sell the 302,400 sausages that would fit in that much skin.
I wonder if the thieves thought that the 5cwt (5 hundredweight, about 250kg) of sausage skins were actually something else?
Did they get this very heavy stash back home, rip off the covering with a flourish, and find disappointingly empty sausage skins rather than the big slab of meat they thought they had stolen?
I wonder what else you can do with sausage casings? Do ou think there is there some other reason they could have stolen them?
Buried words and Bushwa. 
I hope they have a long use-by date. You’re probably still eating them in Australia now! I suppose it’s not easy to find if there’s any follow-up to this, and as to whether the criminals are still out there!
Ewwww… I hadn’t thought of that! Right, sausages are off the menu now!
30,000+ sausages is a lot of fundraising sausage sizzles. 😉
Sometimes people steal things just to steal things. Especially college kids. Or so I’ve been told.
Clearly not the voice of experience there, nice to know….. 😉
If it wasn’t for the weight of this booty I would think the same thing, 250kg seems a little heavy to be the victim of a crime of opportunity though. I am still trying to think of what the sausage casings could be used for other that sausages.
Perhaps it was just some rival sausage skin company cutting costs!
I hadn’t thought about a rival company. They could not only have been cutting their own costs but driving up those of a competitor.
Of course, most likely it was just some knuckleheads who didn’t know what they were doing and ended up with something they had no use for.
Ewww… 250kg of unwanted skins mouldering away in a shed somewhere. Yuck!
lol – I think this was definitely a case of mistaken identity. 😀
Btw, I /think/ we have a resident owl! Or maybe we always had him/her just never noticed. I’ve seen friend owl 3 times now, hanging around near my compost pile. Attracted to the mice perhaps? So happy. 🙂
Really!? That is great! 😀 What kind of owl do you think it is?
Not long after we moved in here I saw a big owl on the shed roof one night and I was thrilled to think we had a resident owl. Never saw it again! bugger 😉
I’ve got no idea what kind it is but it’s not all that big – about the size of a well fed kookaburra. I’m pretty sure it’s hanging around because my compost attracts mice. I managed to take a couple of very dark pictures… on my phone! The Coolpix camera didn’t even come close to picking it up. If I can clean up the pic a bit I’ll post it.
Is it a Tawny Frogmouth? (I love them 🙂 ) Looks a bit like a stumpy branch, a kookaburra without the pointy beak?
It was very dark but yes, something like that. I hope he comes back so I can get a better photo.
I would have been inclined to say case of mistaken identity but the thieves did steal the sausage casings from the Country Service Casing Company. I have no idea what else you would use them for, and Google had no idea either. But, even more strange is if you Google “stolen sausage casings” there are a couple more hits…
I thought the same thing. If they stole 250kg of something from Johnno’s Gold Bars I can imagine that sausage casings would be the last thing on their mind, but the sign on the door clearly says Casing Company…..
I still have no idea what other things these casings could be used for, I even looked up condoms from that era just in case that was an icky but legitimate use for them!
Ebay tells me that 25metres of casings costs about $25. I guess that a butcher might want to steal sausage casings to cut costs. Still weird though, I can imagine a butcher and his mates staggering under the weight of 250kg of casings, the mates only assisted under the promise of as many snags as they could eat…. 😉
Maybe there’s the start of a science fiction story here? Aliens with interesting food habits? Or maybe they have a completely “off-lable” use for those skins?
I guess the aliens have to transport those abducted humans somehow. Perhaps sausage skins are useful for keeping them tightly wrapped! A zero gravity siphon hose for an unexpected interstellar breakdown? 😉
The things people steal. They probably nicked it and then thought, right, what do we do with all this? 😉
You wouldn’t want to leave it just hanging around while you decided would you. I can’t imagine that it would take too long before it started getting a bit whiffy….