What kind of items?
Shipping halters, show girths, tails.
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I donāt know what your style is as an employer, but you could consider specifically assigning responsibility for accounting for items at the end of each day to a couple of grooms and then double check each day that items are accounted for. Communicating with your employees that you are very concerned about these thefts and need their help to combat the situation could be helpful. Iām guessing this situation is a single bad apple in your midst, either client or employee.
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What gets me is the theft of monogramed items? I hope that the person with my raincoat has my same name. And the rain sheet and the irish antisweat sheetā¦
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Donāt leave out shipping halters! Arrive, take off lock up. Or bike lock them. You may lock them all together and to a solid object. Put them in a bag to keep clean.
Our wheelbarrow is bike locked. The feed stall has a padlock. The halters left out are cheap, bought at a yard sale. Theyāre not pretty so so far not taken. Every horse has a leadshank as an extra door tie. Occasionally one disappears. The stallions have a chain longe line snapped to the stall doors.
We double lock everything. Industrial strength padlocks on the tack box.
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In lieu of spending $100+ on a custom branding iron, a woodburning tool from Michaels will do the same thing, not as spiffy, but at a fraction of the cost. There are also leather stamping kits (Amazon, where else) that are ~$25. I did this as we had 3 sets of harness that were almost identical. Keeping straps with the right set was easier with a couple initials on each piece.
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I remember at one point when people really started engraving identifying numbers on things, the police department put out a flyer that said to use your drivers license number or your telephone number because you canāt track anybody through their Social Security number. That may have changed but I seem to remember seeing that somewhere.
While engraving an identifying number or name is a great idea, I feel like itās going to be most effective when the item stays in your barn or thereās a genuine mixup. Or you have some way to track the thief.
If the gear is stolen and sold out of town online, the buyer likely isnāt going to question some ID marker. Because if you legitimately sold your own second hand tack it would be marked. Lots of legit secondhand saddles out there with someone elseās name plate on the cantle.
I like the idea of electronic tracking but I m not sure how well that works to retrieve gear. If your gear turns up pinging in a house across town, how do you get it back? Will the police attend? Do you go pound on the door? Iāve read stories of police refusing to act on pings on cars and phones, would they act on a fake tail?
I think unfortunately prevention and deterrence is the key.
You could have video surveillance running in your tack stall.
Is there any electronic tag that will set off an alarm from your phone if it goes missing? That might be enough to get a thief to ditch it.
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This would likely be very helpful, even a hunting type camera set up so nobody knows about it.
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That would also answer the question of whether itās an inside job. My feeling if it is only ever happening at shows, is itās likely not someone from your home barn. Though that likely depends on how many shows you go to. If you go to one show a year, a sneak thief at your barn would likely be lifting things at home too. But if you go to shows say once a month they could confine themselves to just stealing at shows where they canāt be caught.
Id also keep an ear out for whoever on your team is doing online sales. At our barn we had a young woman who stole two bridles from the horse she leased, and some other stuff as well, that couldnāt be definitely attributed to her. She also lied about horse care and sometimes didnāt feed or come down on the days she was meant to do care (self care barn). She also sold stuff on Etsy or something. Now she never posted the missing bridles locally (because wasnāt stupid) but it occurred to me she was internet savvy enough to just find CL in some random other city.
There could be organized groups of thieves with horse backgrounds working the shows, too. Horse gear is expensive, has a ready resale market if you price right, and shows are so chaotic that people are always leaving gear unattended for periods of time because the horse takes priority.
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Sounds like night check is needed not just at the barns but at the hotel parking lots as well. 
yes there systems that can do that, we installed such a system on a National Guard tank storage yard. The central antenna would ping at regular intervals for all tags to respond then check to see if there any missing tags from its control list
There also so active systems that are continually comparing tags to its control list. Then alarming if a tag is lost contact (or tags) sending an alarm with missing item(s) to whoever was sent up to monitor
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also gives a vindictive person the information to specifically identify an item for them to take
We had a clearly marked halter with horseās name and farm name taken.
So my guess is if some one wants to they will steal anything without a second thought of their licentious behavior
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My sister and I once had all of our tack stolenā everything included my custom schooling chaps and the frigginā dog leashesā at a multi-day show in northern Calif. They were racetrack barns, with about 3 feet of open space between the top of the solid wall and the roof beams. Someone had gone into a horseās stall on the other side and was daring enough to climb up and over the wall, shimmy down into the tack stall and then somehow heave each item back over the wall into that horseās stall. Fortunately other exhibitors loaned us everything we needed, which was so nice and made the experience not so bitter.
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If items have a number, such as a drivers license number, permanently on them , that number can be entered into the system when a police report is obtained. Obviously one would not get a police report for every little halter and muck fork that gets walked off from a horse show but if you have your expensive saddle stolen, I would hope that you would get a police report. At a recent horse show in my area, there was a $10,000 western saddle stolen. I donāt know if they got a police report or not but I certainly hope they did. In any event, if you have a number or other identifying marks permanently fixed onto that expensive item it can be entered into the system in the police report. At that point if thereās a ping or whatever on your AirTag or whatever you have a fixed on it or if you get information that you know where it is or you find it online etc, then at that point, yes the police will go over there because thats stolen property and thatās a crime.
When we set up my new trailer a few years ago, my niece and nephew decided we should mark my things in pink duct tape to differentiate them from other supplies so they landed back on my trailer.
We were at a show and the barn next to us had pink duct tape on their fork and my nephew was sure it was ours and tried to pack it at the end of the show. 
We made sure the fork stayed with the people next door.
So even when you mark things, they can innocently be taken.
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LOL. And here Iāve been agonizing over a sheet, thinking the name on it came out a little more āextraā than I intended. Iāll just embrace it now.
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