Colorado cattle mutilations

Four mutilations of livestock in Gunnison, Colorado over the last few months are freaking out area ranchers. Recently, a horse was shot, its head skinned, and tongue and anus yanked out. And in June, a prize cow was killed and its tongues, lips, and anus removed. Now, I think it's unlikely that high school biology classes from Sirius are swooping down to dissect our livestock. But man, these cattle mutilations are fucking bizarre. From the Denver Post:

The recent mutilations have similarities to mutilations that occurred in the 1960s in neighboring Saguache County. The most famous incident was reported in 1967 when a horse that became known as Snippy" had its head and neck skinned. Like in the most recent cases, there was no blood at the scene or tracks. The mutilations were never solved.

In 2009, a San Luis Valley rancher found four calves with their tongues sliced out, udders removed, eyes cored and faces skinned. Those cases were never solved and there also was no blood nor tracks around those animals.

"Livestock mutilations shake up Gunnison ranching community"

• [ChicagoD]

  Sounds like someone is making hot dogs at home.

• [schlocktober]

  We all know how this story ends: it was college students.

• [Lord Byte]

  Every year this again: Most likely culprit (this HAS happened before): animal dies of natural causes (possibly heat) then crows, buzzards, flies simply get to each of those first, together they dine on the soft stuff that they can actually tear off/out and eat, and leave the rest.
  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cattle_mutilation#Natural_causes

  • [Funk Daddy]

    Having spent a portion of youth examining fresh corpses, desiccated corpses and everything in between I can attest to this too. Nature is quick on her feet and wastes nothing. 

    For instance, were you aware that several varieties of carrion beetle can home in on corpses less than 1 hour after death, even from a distance of 1-2 miles? That’s darned efficient. Nothing dead remains unmolested for more than a few minutes unless it’s in a lab and you dismiss microbial activity.

    • [Jared]

       The only thing is these animals were skinned. There was no blood. There were no tracks.

      • [Gale Mason]

        Exactley, this has been going on for years. No signs of anyone, no footprints, no blood, surgical cuts. It has happened close to peoples farms. It has happened in pens on farms. Back in the 70′s it happened so much people were hidding out there, watching over their livestock. Now it is starting again. You will prob be hearing alot more of this.

  • [SomeGuyNamedMark]

    Shhh, Satan worshiping teenagers inspired by video games is a much more TV friendly explanation.

    • [Roi Truax]

      And that’s the bullshit they’ll most likely try to sell…

      Fear! Fear!

  • [Bill Beaty]

    If lightning had an unrecognized glow-discharge form, that could explain all of it.  But why only livestock?  Then there should be some human examples too.

    Glow-discharge lightning might persist for orders longer than normal lightning.  It hits you, you’re frozen in place as with tasers; can’t even breathe.  Then plasma starts abalating all the apertures in your hide:  eyes, mouth, nostrils, anus.   It would be like torture by invisible aliens with acetylene torches (or neon sign transformers.) Eyewitnesses would see a trembling animal enveloped by a glowing violet column, with brilliant yellow sodium-flares spewing from eyes, anus, etc.  Given enough time it would burrow into everything, and if it burned off skin, this would only be on the highest protrusions of the animal.  If the dirt wasn’t damp there might also be foot burns, but in hoofed livestock this might go unnoticed.  Then the discharge winks out and the animal collapses.

    No tracks.  The wounds would concentrate on high-conductive locations, and might resemble knife-carving, but would actually be bloodless electrocautery, much like pulse-laser ablation.   The animal would NOT be bled dry; instead killed by electric arcing which cauterizes as it vaporizes.

    • [Funk Daddy]

      I never witnessed it in livestock because I wasn’t a rancher or farmer or at the time all that interested in domesticated animal biology. All the similar examples I have seen were wild animals. 

      As for human examples, dogs eat your face first not because they like your smile but because of the close dense capillary & comparatively thin skin combined with easily destructed delicate facial features and the lack of clothing. There are lots of human examples of early decomposition, just look through some pictures of battlefields in the wars of the early 20th century forward.

      No tracks, no, because they silly look for alien and human tracks instead of carrion birds, beetles and other insects, all of which can fly. If left for more than a few hours the small mammals show up and hit the same areas first, often also feasting on the insects & larva of insects that beat them to the punch. Small mammals tracks are tough even if you are looking for them, which mutilation wonderers probably don’t. Bled dry? No, that’s coagulation, there’s blood in dem der veins and arteries, but consider the mouth parts of birds and beetles, and how quickly blood that ain’t flowing coagulates when exposed to open air. It looks clean and dry, and it is, to an extent.

      Had the animals been found a bit later than they were, enough time for bloating or enough time for a larger mammal to show, then believe me they’d be hella more mutilated. What’s seen here is the early stages of decomposition, not an alien mystery or as yet unobserved lightning formats, as cool as either would be .

    • [Donald Petersen]

      Is this actually a thing?  If it ever took place in recorded history, we might have more worshippers of Zeus today.

      • [Bill Beaty]

        Hot lightning makes you religious? Fires, steam explosions, seconds-long strikes, and carbonized pathway (imagine an ancient Greek victim receiving all three!)   Or cattle:

        http://ticker.mesonet.org/archive/20100621/Cow_vs._Lightning.jpg

        http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1136542/Pictured-The-cow-zapped-lightning–survived.html

        But that’s somewhat rare.  Common, non-hot lightning lasts for mSec and barely leaves a mark.

        Yes, we saw “purple column” lightning occasionally with Dr. VandeGraaff’s huge machine at MOS Boston.  No “pistol shot,” just a thud sound.  I also saw it with classroom VandeGraaffs.  When you hear a VDG machine going SNAP, SNAP, fbump, SNAP, that “fbump” would appear as a dim, 3cm-wide purple column only visible in complete darkness.   If leaping to a metal plate, sometimes it would show a ‘flower head’ of multiple branches.  The “fbump” noise suggests lack of supersonic air motions and long dwell time: a high-resistance channel when compared to the usual bright discharges.  But I have no idea whether it scales up past 3M.

        If we imagine what you’d experience if struck by such an odd storm discharge  …we get trademark “cattle mutilation.”

• [Cody Ference]

  Carrion eaters always eat around the eyes, ears, nose, and anus first. There’s nothing strange except that this is being reported .

• [Ramone]

  Why don’t they just put up a bunch of outdoor webcams. Shouldn’t all ranchers being doing this by now? A few thousand bucks investment is easily worth ONE of those poor horseys.

• [electronicnonsense]

  Um. Wild scavengers? I thought this was common knowledge after the widespread debunking of claims of space aliens mutilating cattle.

  The scavengers eat the soft parts, which is exactly what you listed. Anus, eyes, lips, tongue, neck, etc… then the drying out skin stretches tight which makes the cuts at these parts seem more clean and surgical than they actually are. It’s actually not surprising that more animals are falling over dead on the range due to the drought that’s going on.

• [Rosamond d’Orlac]

  Dave – the ranchers themselves do this.  A cow that dies from the drought insurance doesn’t cover whereas a murdered and mutilated cow is covered.

  • [Funk Daddy]

    Most herd replacement policies cover natural conditions unless negligence can be shown.

  • [Gale Mason]

    That my friend is not true!

• [kgus]

  Chupacabra.  It’s obvious.

• [Rich Keller]

  I remember some quotes from Omni about cattle mutilations from about 30  years ago:

  “If coyotes did this, they did it with knives.”
  “If surgeons did this, they did it with their teeth.”

• [Jerril]

  Recently, a horse was shot, its head skinned, and tongue and anus yanked out.

  So, lesseee. Horse, shot. Which says gun. Therefore… SPACE ALIENS! Jeeze. Find the ass-hole neighbour who hates you or your horse, instead of wasting time blaming it on sky-people.

  Predators and scavengers alike pull the hide off of animals. Skinning is not unique to humans. Canines and bears are particularly known for it, I’m not sure about cats but cats can definitely pluck feathers and thick fur.

  Tongue is soft and meaty and not protected by skin, and a high value target.

  The anus is soft, protected only by thin skin, and provides a convenient way into the body cavity for smaller scavengers. Even larger predators tend to start eating kills around the ass end.

  And in June, a prize cow was killed and its tongues, lips, and anus removed.

  Your “tongues” has a misplaced plural. Same comments, with the added note that lips are, like the anus, made of soft thin skinned tissue, and therefore easy to get off the corpse.

  I really shouldn’t be surprised that people still don’t know bull-crap about scavengers, predation, and the decay process, but aaaaaaarg. These stories are like the biology-space-woo equivalent of pointing to mammoth skulls and saying they’re proof of Giants walking the earth before the Flood.

  • [Bradley BoyEs]

    Err, neither boing boing or the source article mention aliens. So what are you on about?

  • [mccrum]

    “Your “tongues” has a misplaced plural.”

    That’s how it won that prize.

• [Thorzdad]

  My sister lives in Gunnison. I’ll have to ask her what she’s been up to lately.

• [Eddie Perkins]

  This is just a case of “I want to believe.” Simplest explanation is predation, but satanists and space aliens are less boring. 

• [Boundegar]

  If I recall, the Church of the Subgenius claimed responsibility for the cases in the 60′s, despite or perhaps because of the fact they didn’t even exist yet.

• [liquidstar]

  This is a pretty old and widespread mystery.  This is the first story I ve seen to my knowledge that actually involves a mutilation AND a gunshot wound.  I tend to give the ranchers the benefit of the doubt;  I think they would be very familiar with normal decaying processes of animals; I also doubt they are killing their own animals (surely there are more believeable causes to list/fake for insureance companies?).  I Know that during the original rash of mutlilations in the early 70′s it got so bad that the ranchers actually created a kind of lobby group to attempt to pettition the authorities to take it more seriously (which they never did, in fact the original explation was ” wolves did it” or something to that effect) – that alone indicates that something out of the ordinary was going on.  Add to that reports that in some of these cases mutilations occurred very quickly, too quickly for ordinary decomposition processes – and we are back to calling the witnesses liars.

  • [hymenopterid]

    “and we are back to calling the witnesses liars.”
    Eyewitnesses have been known to be wrong on occasion. Persons with a capacity for subtlety understand that this is not the same thing as being a liar.

• [Recluse]

  Countdown to Police Spokesperson implicating some local crazed on Bath Salts, or a ‘new form of LSD’.  DRUGS ARE BAD!!

  • [tré]

    The “new form of [insert chemical name here]” thing is always great. It’s like, how many psychoactive lysergic acid diethylamides are out there?

• [Teller]

  Sounds like people from planet Vega.

  • [AnthonyC]

    Come now, they wouldn’t interfere, it’s against their laws: what happens in the Vegas stays in the Vegas

    • [Teller]

      Forgot!

• [info]

  +1 for the scavengers explanation, BUT… I remember the most educative book “Mirage Men” (previously reviewed here on BB) going into some details about the real story behind the 50s “cattle mutilation wave”. So I wouldn’t be surprised if this was a random and stupidly brutal sampling to check for livestock contamination after some sort of environmental booboo.

  • [kenmce]

    SI wouldn’t be surprised if this was a random and stupidly brutal sampling to check for livestock contamination

    Wouldn’t it be simpler to go around with a trailer and just buy a few cows? 

    Then you could skip the theft, trespass, and angry men with shotguns part entirely.

• [Daniel Xavier Xibille Friedman]

  Sounds a lot like Narco related mutilations, or Narco-related cults (Santa Muerte)

• [yahoo-4KK3FBIPV2KROBAVRHNOIEDV4U]

  i always find it interesting when people are eager to dismiss occurrences like this as the result of nature. the last time i checked, animals and insects are NOT capable of skinning livestock and “removing” tongues, lips, and anuses while leaving zero traces of blood. i could certainly see nature being responsible for the eating, deterioration of, or decaying of such parts but the article uses the word removed which does not preclude nature as the culprit but it also does not suggest it either.

  the source article also mentions a similar 2009 incident that describes livestock tongues as being “SLICED out, udders REMOVED, eyes CORED, and faces SKINNED.” i would like to note that slicing, removing, coring, and skinning are not typically understood as being natural processes.

  also, there is no mention of the word gun in the source article however it does say that the horse in question “APPEARED to be shot.” interestingly enough, the article provides no additional info about the shooting other than to say that no bullet was found. and i would like to, again, note the absence of blood and or footprints or tracks!

  lastly and most importantly is this quote,

  “Clarke’s ranch foreman, Allen Roper, told the Gunnison Country Times that the mutilated animals appeared to be shot, but no bullets were found and that the mutilations were done WITH KNIVES and WERE NOT A RESULT OF PREDATORS.”

  so with that, i ask Eddie Perkins, Jerril (who apparently believes that guns are the only mechanisms capable of shooting), FunkDaddy, electronicnonsense, Cody Ference, lord byte, and all others who seem so eager to dismiss (through speculation, i might add) this as nature taking its course, to address the facts outlined in my comments and the source article. i suspect that the lot of you will either have to revise your comments, ignore mine, or come up with more speculation that disregards the stated facts. 

  and for the record, i have no idea what caused these mutilations and i care not to speculate, however i do become quite annoyed when folks seem to willfully ignore the facts (no matter how scarce or disparate they may be) in order to explain away events  that seem to defy our conventional understanding of the world and the things in it! i look forward to your (hopefully logical and respectful) responses.

  • [Noctilucent Studios]

     Fantastic response. Well done. So nice to see logic applied where it’s often sorely lacking. This is a legit. mystery that deserves more than knee-jerk retorts from “city folk” who wouldn’t know a predator from a hole in the ground.

    • [Funk Daddy]

      I have lived in big cities, in one I worked at the natural history museum where we look into such things (nature, not fantasy spook stories), but now I live in the woods where I encounter animals dead and alive quite regularly, much as I did when I was a kid.

      In the time I’ve spent living rurally or working with animals (dead and live) I’ve handled, killed, kept, saved, bred, skinned, stuffed, de-boned, dissected more animals than most people rural or citified.

      As for logic, you are commending someone who thinks that pointing out that there were parts of the animal missing, then pointing out their mistaken belief that creatures don’t do that to other creatures as justification of their -belief- that it wasn’t nature taking it’s course. 

      Do you believe that carrion eaters, scavengers, predators, insects, birds and and mammals, somehow eat of the corpse but leave everything there too? You believe in Schrödinger’s  Corpse, like your friend? Do you believe, like your friend, that corpses bleed from tiny wounds of the mouth parts of insects, birds or even small mammals? They don’t.

      Take it from someone who has actually handled a skinning knife on fresh and long dead corpses -and- seen a lot of corpses of different ages in natural settings. IF this was done by humans, it was to provoke media and the nutbars like above who have their news aggregators set to “crazy”.

      Oh, and yahoo-longnumbername, no, I’m not respectful to people who think scavengers don’t scavenge and that natural processes are less likely than humans acting stupid or aliens, sorry, and I’ve seen too many dead things decaying to trust a ranch hand to know the difference between a knife cut and skin tightening over bone after being nibbled at.

      This stuff is about as mysterious as crop circles. Yes, i said that to poke fun at your ridiculous beliefs over crop circles. It’s also as mysterious as books were to the illiterate people through the ages. Very, very, mysterious, until you teach them to read.

      • [yahoo-4KK3FBIPV2KROBAVRHNOIEDV4U]

        oh funk daddy, thine “rebuttal” doth reek.

        please tell me how does your so called employment at an unnamed natural history museum in an unnamed big city lend any credibility to your self assured assertion that cattle mutilations can be explained away by predators? i suspect that you will conveniently not answer this question in the same way that you conveniently failed to address the FACTS i put forth in my earlier post. it’s also noteworthy that these mutilations have been mysterious and inconclusive enough to warrant investigation by both the FBI and the ATF (both in 1979).

        should i assume that your time spent at the natural history museum and in the woods has provided you with greater resources, understanding, and  insight than lifetime cattle hands AND the FBI and ATF?

        did you read my post at all? because i never said that “creatures don’t do that to other creatures” nor did i deny the possibility that nature might be responsible, i only pointed out that the source article specifically and contextually indicated that nature/predators were probably NOT responsible for the mutilations. perhaps you didn’t read the article either.

        then there was this unsubstantiated accusation,

        “Do you believe, like your friend, that corpses bleed from tiny wounds of the mouth parts of insects, birds or even small mammals?”

        when did i say that i believed this? please provide a quote. you might want to improve your reading comprehension before making such inferences. i don’t claim to be a zoologist or to have done all of the things that you claim, but i have never heard/read of a single instance where scavengers, be they insects, mammals, or otherwise, leave ZERO traces of blood after eating. if you know of such instances, please provide links!

        i’d also be interested in any links you might have that show where a scavenger has “shot” its meal in the head. or maybe you’ve got links to scavengers using knives to cut up their food. and since the witnesses consistently describe the scenes as being devoid of tracks, perhaps you can introduce me to insect or bird species that have been shown to carefully remove udders and slice out cattle tongues and core out eyes all while being careful not to leave a single drop of blood. i’d even be open to your explanation of how a human could do this without leaving tracks or some other form of evidence.

        which scavengers slice off cattle ears in “circular, surgical-like cuts?”

        what predator/scavenger is able to cause “tongues [to be] sliced off in straight lines back behind the teeth.”Colorado cow mutilations baffle ranchers, cops, UFO believer – The Denver Post http://www.denverpost.com/ci_13956752#ixzz23ND5uoeM
        please tell me, because i am dying to know. or maybe you could tell me what in nature could be responsible for causing the liver and heart of mutilated cattle to become white and have the consistency of peanut butter. (as reported by Officer Gabriel Valdez of the New Mexico Police on 3/24/78)better yet, you might explain to us “nutbars” how liver samples from mutilated cattle have been found to be completely devoid of copper in addition to having 4 times the normal amount of zinc, potassium, and phosphorous. (Section 4 or the FBI’s published document called Operation Cattle Mutilation)you’d also do well to read the National Institute of Discovery Science’s 2002 report entitled, “Three Reports of Unusual Killings and Mutilation of Calves.”i’ll stop here and end by pointing out that i haven’t made a single reference to aliens or crop circles as you suggest. you should be more careful in your reading and perhaps refrain from attempting to ridicule those who use facts to support their ideas. you might even benefit from learning how to use facts to support your own ideas. just a thought!

        i hope you return to this thread because i would seriously like to hear your answers to the questions i’ve posed. hopefully you will have practiced some reading comprehension by then! cheers!

• [artaxerxes]

  Artistry-offal cuisine course at University of Wyoming/Nebraska/Montana/Culinary Institute of the Heartlands?

  Braised Tongue
  Traditional Desert-Style Poached Eyeball
  Andouillette with Real Anus

  To my palate, it’s a bit hot for those autumnal/wintery braised dishes. But, then again, it’s Summer Session at the University, and one frequently has to compromise when one is taking Summer Session courses. 

  Competitive students who want to make sure their menus won’t inadvertently ape their classmates’ Cartes du Jour should be looking at nearby herb plants that have been ransacked. And don’t forget, wildflowers make excellent garnis, frequently bringing flavor and color to the plate.

• [Jim Kelly]

  Anton Chigurh.

• [efergus3]

  Time to send for the Mystery Inc. gang! They’ll clear it up in no time.

• [yahoo-4KK3FBIPV2KROBAVRHNOIEDV4U]

  there’s also a link in the original article to the 2009 mutilations. if anyone is interested, it’s a good read that pretty much COMPLETELY obliterates the possibility that the mutilations were a result of nature taking its course.

  http://www.denverpost.com/ci_13956752

  i’m interested in what folks will have to say about this.

• [Kevin Atkins]

  Chinese medicinal/gourmet food collectors with a captive-bolt gun.

• [Genre Slur]

  If most ufo/uap are actually an as yet un-analysed phyla of atmospheric organism (think large gaseous/cloud like version of jelly fish), then hey! They may be ‘feeding’ on the bottom of the atmospheric ocean….
  Excuse me, I think I was thrice possessed by Charles Fort, Robert Anton Wilson, and Trevor Constable. Lo!

• [McDruid]

  Not this again. Big deal in the 80′s. Multiple page article in the L.A. Times, among others. Exhaustively investigated. Due to natural causes: bugs, other scavengers. Ranchers are generally clueless. Put it to rest.

  • [puzzlingevidence]

     ”Ranchers are generally clueless.”

    Really? You actually think that? Successful animal husbandry requires extensive knowledge and hands-on experience. Ranchers are outdoors dealing with their livestock every single day. You really think they’re unfamiliar with the most commonplace processes of nature? Because I had it figured out really early on, and that was just from bumming around farms on weekends as a little kid.

    • [McDruid]

       No, that was actually one of the findings of the investigations way back when: that ranchers really were clueless when it came to understanding predators. Probably some self-selection bias too: the one’s that know what is going on, don’t make a big deal about it.

• [ifreecarve]

  To wear my conspiracy theory hat, I thought it was plausible that the military would be taking tissue samples — thyroid and digestive tract — to look for evidence of radiation in animals.  That made some sense during the cold war nuclear testing, but I’m at a loss to say why it would be happening again now.  

• [khordas]

  The skin from a horse’s head is needed to make a nith-pole, a magic curse from some of the norse and norse revival religions.  It’s basically the same idea as the KKK leaving a burning cross on your lawn.  I’d look around for some norse or asatru themed white supremacist groups and see if anyone had reported being harassed or threatened by someone leaving a carved pole draped in the skin of a horse on their property. 

• [Gale Mason]

  You all need to do more research! This is not done by animals or bugs! They “THINK” the animals were shot. But can’t find where or the bullet, Hummm. Go back to the 70′s when this was a daily occurance. This is starting again. Farmers and ranchers are not stupid. They report deaths they can not explain. DO SOME RESEARCH before running at the mouth. One story does not make anyone an “EXPERT”.

• [Genre Slur]

  TEH SKIN-WALKERS DID IT. I CRY EREYTIME THEY UNLEASH THE ROUGE.

• [mkanoap]

  Can we please get a Maggie followup on cattle mutilation?  It’s really not a scientific mystery, and I think the details are interesting, if a little gross.