'Not One Drop of Blood': Cattle Mysteriously Mutilated in Oregon | Hacker News Reader

'Not One Drop of Blood': Cattle Mysteriously Mutilated in Oregon

npr.org

34 pointsph0rque19 comments

Here we go again... these things seem to happen surprisingly frequently, which has driven all kinds of conspiracy theories for decades. See [1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cattle_mutilation

Yeah, my immediate thought was that it sounds like the chupacabra https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chupacabra and I was surprised it wasn't mentioned.

I think there’s a good chance that these are being done by people because cattle mutilations are such a long running famous mystery.

That is, I think the likeliest explanation is that people are doing this for no other purpose than for it to be noticed and wondered at.

Human motivations are weird and irrational and there is plenty of evidence that some people will go to great lengths to make themselves feel entertained, smart, superior. There’s a long tradition of bored people doing weird things just to wind everyone up from behind the scenes.

There is nothing physically unexplainable here. The scene could be created by a couple of people with a sharp knife and some experience with butchering animals.

The only mystery to me is how they deposit the dead cows without leaving obvious tracks. I assume the ranchers who often claim that there aren't any tracks just kind of suck at finding them. Or that the pranksters bring a broom to hide them afterward.

It's kind of a dick move in any case, though. Cattle aren't cheap and killing them for no reason is just destructive.

Much like crop circles, and gerbil stuffing, seductive bs goes viral and becomes, in fact a thing. File under: humans being.

Heh, it's not for the notice and wonder. These cows are after all quite expensive. It's for the insurance money.

I bet they were mutilated using Occam's Razor.

I see what you did there.

Mysterious cattle mutilations have been reported in the US for my whole life (long time!) and probably before. It was a meme for the kinds of people who believe in conspiracies by the US government to conceal the existence of UFOs and aliens on earth, long before it was a plot element of the X-Files 25 years ago.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cattle_mutilation

I'm always reminded of Dan Aykroyd's line in the 1992 movie "Sneakers". His character, Mother, was huge on conspiracy theories.

"Cattle mutilations are up."

Asian longhorned tick?

"the ticks can attack en masse and drain young animals of blood so quickly that they die—an execution method called exsanguination"

https://arstechnica.com/science/2018/08/us-invaded-by-savage...

Let's just entertain the though of ETs for a moment. They would probably be trying to replicate the natural way of producing methane, perhaps to terraform a planet. Alright my tinfoil hat is coming off :)

0: Methane, explained https://www.nationalgeographic.com/environment/global-warmin...

Could they have been poisoned? If there’s not blood, and no clear trauma, that sounds like the most obvious answer

edit: and then cut up for some reason...

And cleaned the blood off the ground?!? Doesn’t seem reasonable someone took them somewhere else killed them and brought them back, but if not where’s the blood?

This takes conclusions drawn in the article as givens, when those conclusions may not be supportable. I'm neither a phlebotomist nor a geologist, but is it really impossible that an animal's blood would soak into the loose, sandy soil pictured in the article and disappear? Or that scavenger animals such as ants would eat or carry off dried blood?

And more importantly, exsanguinated.

There was an interesting take on this on Reddit a few days back

https://reddit.com/r/HighStrangeness/comments/d5mqw6/_/f0t0p...

So some government agency is going into farms dead at night with a heli and cutting out the cow to check for mad cow disease? Uh ok, but why would they do it in such secrecy?

Furthermore, why would they leave the corpses? If they actually are infected you would never want to leave the corpse or have to come back for it later, and if they aren't, well, you have a super creepy blood-drained corpse with various organs surgically excised just sitting there on someone's property as a magnet for panic and conspiracy speculations.

If the govt actually wanted to collect cattle for this kind of testing, they could easily pass a law that let them take animals and pay market rate for them. I imagine this would be much cheaper and simpler than ongoing covert helicopter operations combined with the cost of the investigations that the FBI did in the '70s. It's an explanation that makes basically no sense

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