We’ve heard the creepy stories before: A farmer goes out in the field to feed their livestock and discovers one (or more) cows dead, drained of blood, perhaps missing an appendage or two. Such stories were once so prevalent that the FBI investigated cattle mutilations in the '70s. “The ranchers and rural residents of Colorado are concerned and frightened by these incidents,” wrote then-Colorado senator Floyd K. Haskell in a letter to the FBI. UFOs, sinister cults and secret government operations have all been blamed. Scientists have put forth more mundane explanations, such as run of the mill scavengers. Ranchers still report these incidents, and cattle mutilation has been enshrined in popular culture on shows like the “The X-Files.” Modern Farmer talked to Bill Ellis, associate professor of English and American Studies at Penn State Hazelton, who wrote about the phenomena of cattle mutilation in his book, “Raising the Devil: Satanism, New Religions, and the Media.”
Modern Farmer: How old are these stories? How far back to they go?
BE: The earliest cycle of stories that I’ve seen date back to the beginning of the 20th century in England. There were cycles of panics that were caused by people allegedly killing and mutilating horses and domestic animals of various kinds. And there were a number of explanations that then created an additional flap on top of that, and that’s mostly what I’m interested in — when you have all of these theories that explain the mutilations and then those theories take on a life of their own. There were two ideas: One was that there was a wolf that had been somebody’s pet that had escaped and was committing all of these mutilations. Wolves by that time were extinct in England, so there’s no way that an actual wolf could have appeared and done all of these things. And the other thing was that it was a lunatic – that there was somebody going around and doing this out of some kind of psychological compulsions. And in fact there was a person who was arrested and was tried and convicted of committing a number of these mutilations. And here’s an interesting twist: Arthur Conan Doyle, who was the creator of Sherlock Holmes, actually investigated the evidence and found a number of faults and determined that the person had been set up as the culprit because people had an ethnic prejudice against him — he was an East Indian, a scapegoat to blame for these incidents. It’s something that then crops up in the popular press in a small way off and on in England and particularly in the United States until the ’60s, and it then becomes much bigger news, blamed initially on hippie cults. This was the time where there was a lot of attention being given to the counterculture and the interest of some people in non-traditional religions: cosmic consciousness and meditation. And it was a time that the actual Church of Satan in San Francisco was founded. That had generated a lot of press and a lot of concerns. The theory then became developed that what was happening was some of these young people had been recruited into some sort of cult that involved animal sacrifice...more
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