In the gardening world, squirrels are a definite enemy. These little rodents love nibbling on everything from fruits and berries to flowers and tree buds, making them a menace to the budding (excuse the pun) gardener. When squirrels are afoot in the garden, you’ll often notice things like shallow digging spots and missing fruit. So, when Rob Morin saw produce had been going missing from his garden, he assumed there were a few pesky squirrels to blame.
Rob and his wife Paula Habib live in the Mount Royale neighborhood of Montreal, Canada. The couple loves to garden, and every year, they grow batches of food in hanging baskets outside their home.
This past June, the couple noticed tomatoes were going missing from their hanging garden. “Each year, we hang tomatoes and strawberries in front of our house,” Rob told CNN. “This year, after many were ripe, we noticed they were going missing.”
“We first thought it was the squirrels. But normally, the squirrels leave a mess and there was not a mess on the ground where the plants were.”
The couple couldn’t figure out what was happening to their tomatoes and berries. Every day, more and more were going missing, and Rob and Paula were growing increasingly perplexed.
“We had a full set of tomatoes and then, all of a sudden, the tomatoes started going down,” Paula told CTV News. “We didn’t take any ourselves.”
Rob consulted the home’s security cameras in hopes of solving the mystery— and when he saw what had been going on, he was completely stunned.
The security footage showed the couple’s mailman stealing fruit from their entranceway (on at least four different occasions) in the most recent days.
“It’s rude,” Paula told CTV News. “He never told us. He never came to the door and said, ‘I took one of your tomatoes and it was really good’ or made a joke about it. He just did it, and he couldn’t care less.” Her husband expressed similar sentiments:
“It would have been OK if he took a couple as a quick snack or let us know as a joke he took a couple and they tasted great.”
“But he took so many and did not notify us that there was pretty much nothing left for us to eat.”
The family didn’t want the mailman to be fired, but they did want an apology. They also said a strawberry pie or some tomato sauce in exchange for their stolen produce definitely wouldn’t hurt.
A few days after the incident, Jon Hamilton, a spokesperson for Canada Post, reached out to The Canadian Press, revealing that a supervisor had apologized to the couple in person and brought them tomatoes as a gesture of goodwill.
While there, the supervisor also told them the mailman “feels very bad” about the incident.
People seem conflicted about the entire event. Comments on the video read:
“I hope he gets fired… I can see eating maybe one. But he ate everything on that plant… fire this loser. Makes us look bad. Theft is theft.”
“The proper thing to do would be to talk to the mailman or leave him a note and if that didn’t work then talk to Canada Post… but I think it was really low to call the news and put it all over the country.”
“How is this even news….. if the mail man ate my produce I wouldn’t care better a human than a squirrel.”
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