Texas Cow Mutilations May Have Strangely Mundane Explanation

A case of cattle mutilation in TEXAS has made international headlines over the weekend.

The reports out of Madison County in east Texas say that SIX cows were found, dead, and missing their tongues.

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No cattle mutilation story would be complete without claims that mutilation was done with “surgical precision”…and this story has that, too.

According to the Madison County sheriff’s office, “a straight, clean cut, with apparent precision” had removed the hide around the cows’ mouths and the tongues were removed…with NO blood spill (another hallmark of the cattle mutilation genre).

Reports of cattle being mutilated are nothing new.

The first reports actually date to the early 17^th century. But the phenomenon really hit its stride in the 1970s in the United States.

Ranchers reported finding their livestock dead, often with their eyes, tongues, genitals, and anuses removed. Most of those reports also noted the seeming “surgical precision” of the missing parts.  And, as with most unexplained things in the 70s, aliens were suggested as the culprits.

Wikipedia has an entire page devoted to the cattle mutilation phenomenon.  You’ll find a lot of speculation about the aforementioned aliens. Also, Satan worshippers or shadowy government agencies usually get mentioned.

But, there’s another explanation out there that DOESN’T involve aliens or Satanists.

It involves bugs and birds (and a few other scavengers). All the way back in 1979, a sheriff in Arkansas named Herb Marshall had a suspicion about who or what was mutilating local ranchers’ cows.

Herb decided to run an experiment.  He obtained a fresh cow carcass and put it outside, in the kinds of conditions the mutilated cows were found in.

Then he waited…and watched.  NO aliens or cultists were observed, but Sheriff Marshall noticed a few things happening.

First, the gasses inside the dead cow expanded, splitting the belly open and exposing the cow’s organs. Then, blowflies began to devour the carcass and lay their eggs in the soft tissue of the body.

The combination of the flies and their offspring resulted in some very precise, almost surgical circles on the cow. The soft tissue…eyes, lips, tongue, genitals, and any exposed organs, were all removed in exactly the way that witnesses were describing.

BUT, without anything supernatural or extraterrestrial going on. In other words, the corpse of a cow was OBSERVED to have been “mutilated” in just the same way that was being reported…all from natural causes and processes.

A decade later, Canadian scientists recreated the experiment. Their finding was that most, if not ALL, cattle mutilations could be explained by scavenging animals and insects.

In their report, the scientists said:

...any investigation (into cattle mutilations) must rule out scavenging beyond a reasonable doubt before proceeding to other possibilities.

Let me know what you think at buzz@klaq.com