Sunday, September 20, 2015

Cattle mutilations: Legitimate lore or cold-file mysteries

Arroyo Hondo residents Sara and Alexander Levy monitor a cow for radiation (1995)

by Cody Hooks

Imagine this — it’s a July evening in Arroyo Hondo. The waning sky and moon are beginning to give way to night. And a rancher latches a gate behind him after checking in on the livestock for the evening. It all seems fine, especially the 6-month-old bull. But in the morning light of a new day, it becomes clear that nothing about his pasture is fine, especially the bull. 

No signs of struggle mar the pasture beyond the willows where the bull lay dead. Skin was missing from around the jaw. One eye, the tongue and its penis were totally gone, nowhere in the field to be found. The animal’s rear end was cored out. The scene was absolutely bloodless. 

The mutilated cows of Taos were serious business in the mid-'90s. Ever since one of the first reported cases in 1976 near Pot Mountain came to light, the mystery of how cows ended up dead and disfigured only grew more stupefying. 

he Hondo case shared the same elemental traits with cattle mutilations spread across the globe. From Mora to Brazil and Dulce to France, mutilated cows and other large mammals had organs and skin missing — removed with surgical precision — and bones exposed, as white and clean as an alabaster gravestone. 

Despite the mutilations appearance across time and space, no one has come up with a definitive explanation of what happened. 

Most folks who call themselves level-headed chalk it up to predators. But what an imperfect explanation, as many of the ranchers whose cows turn up dead say the eery ease of the field look nothing like a predator kill they had ever seen. Most everyone else hypothesizes UFOs. But that, too, fails to take the story from A to Z. Perhaps it was simply a crime spree with dedicated copycats, a government coverup of mad cow disease, a secret puesdo-military base in Archuleta Mesa, santanists or just demented pranksters. 

But do ambiguous theories really satisfy curiosity? Perhaps it is the veil of mystique that has lodged the story of cow mutilations so firmly in our local mythology.

Phaedra Greenwood, a local author and former reporter with The Taos News, started looking into the phenomenon in 1995 when one reported mutilation turned into several. The tell-tale signs of mutilations kept turning up in Sheriff’s reports and call logs. Greenwood even joined a team of local police and investigators, recording the sites and talking to neighbors when dispatched to another weird cow death.

A former district attorney investigator and judge, John Paternoster, had a client who was a rancher north of Questa. Like so many other human victims of these mutilations, the rancher lost several head of cattle to mutilations. That was serious business, especially when every lost cow meant less profit — realistically, most “profits” were just enough to get by until the next year. 

Paternoster called for an official investigation into the phenomena, saying law enforcement ought to treat each mutilation as a crime scene and use an official protocol, thus legitimizing the investigations and hopefully find a way to the root of the costly mystery. Enticing theories aside, Paternoster once told Greenwood, “There are few frontiers available to curious minds, and this is one of them.” 


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