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| 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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