Issues of concern to people who live in the west: property rights, water rights, endangered species, livestock grazing, energy production, wilderness and western agriculture. Plus a few items on western history, western literature and the sport of rodeo... Frank DuBois served as the NM Secretary of Agriculture from 1988 to 2003. DuBois is a former legislative assistant to a U.S. Senator, a Deputy Assistant Secretary of Interior, and is the founder of the DuBois Rodeo Scholarship.
Tuesday, October 02, 2012
Cattle mutilation puzzles rancher, authorities
Rancher Joseph L. Torres knew one of his cattle had gone missing, but
when he found out what had happened to the six-month-old heifer he was
astonished. His son had gone hunting on the family ranch 40
miles west of Trinidad on the Sunday before Labor Day, about a month
ago, and came upon the remains of the heifer. The dead animal was
missing its uterus, tongue and part of one ear, yet there was no blood
in the area or signs of human presence. Torres said he went out
to confirm his son’s report of the dead heifer, but found a black bear
feasting on the dead cow. Still, he was able to confirm what his son had
described. He called the sheriff’s department, which arrived the next
day. Torres said he still can’t understand what happened to the heifer. “It
was a really scary thing to see, and I felt terrible for that poor
animal,” Torres said. “Bears don’t remove body parts that way, so it had
to be something else. Another strange thing was that all the vegetation
around the animal was dead, for about a 12 to 14 foot area.” It’s
not the first cattle mutilation reported in Las Animas County in recent
years. Rancher Mike Duran reported a similar cattle mutilation that
happened on his nearby ranch in 2009. Many of the details of the two
deaths are similar, so Duran contacted Torres when he heard about the
recent incident. One of Duran’s cows was killed in 1995, with
its udders removed and other body parts missing, also with no evidence
of blood in the area. Duran checked out the death on the Torres ranch
and got in touch with Chuck Zukowski, who has researched many similar
incidents in his work with Colorado Springs-based Mutual Unidentified
Flying Objects Network (MUFON). Zukowski and other MUFON
researchers visited the Torres ranch shortly after the recent incident,
taking photos and measurements to compare the mutilation with similar
incidents that have occurred across the West since the 1970s. MUFON
tries to determine whether there is a link between reported UFO
sightings and cattle mutilations that occur at about the same time and
place. “One of the first things we look for is blood,” Zukowski
said last week. “In the Torres case, as in so many others we’ve
investigated, there’s little or no sign of blood. There’s usually no
sign of a struggle, and the animal is just lying there. There’s also no
sign of human intervention or predatory animal attacks that led to the
death. One reason we think it might be UFOs doing this is that there are
often signs of animals being moved from place to place, that is,
grabbed in one area, eviscerated in another and dropped in a third area.
There is no natural predator that we know of who could do that. The
possibilities are almost endless.”...more
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