Slain cattle stripped of certain organs with surgical precision and found in pastures with no trace of blood or evidence have stumped ranchers and law enforcement in quiet farming communities nationwide since at least the 1970s, and potentially for over a century.
The animals are found in unnatural positions and drained entirely of blood by befuddled ranchers in Minnesota, Colorado, Nebraska, Iowa, Kansas, Oregon and elsewhere.
Sgt. Jeremiah Holmes of the Wheeler County Sheriff’s Office in Oregon, who has overseen five such cases over the past six years, told Fox News Digital that “there’s more questions in this thing than there are answers.”
It is a felony to kill a farmer’s livestock, Holmes said. But there have never been any substantive leads to follow in these cases. The first time the lawman saw an animal die under these circumstances, he said, there was a dearth of tracks or blood in the newly fallen snow.
“Why would someone take a reproductive organ unless it was a ritual or testing? I guess I don’t know,” Holmes said.
“Individuals will reach out and give their theory. Some think its aliens, some think it’s the government doing testing, some think it’s some rancher trying to get even – there are so many theories,” Holmes said. “The only one I have minimized is predators – having grown up in the country . . . and being in the livestock industry, I’ve seen firsthand what a bear will do, a cougar will do, wild dogs will do, even what a man will do. Having seen all that firsthand, there’s no way that I can…chalk this up to predators of any sort.”