By Bruce Daniels – ABQnewsSeeker
Friday, 13 March 2009 08:20
Incident reported Sunday at ranch west of Trinidad where similar mutilation occurred in `90s.
A cow was found mutilated last Sunday at a ranch about a mile west of Weston, Colo., near Trinidad, its udder and uterus removed with no signs of blood around the wounds, The Raton Range reported.
Ranch owner Mike Duran said he found the cow around 9:30 or 10 a.m. lying in the middle of the winter pasture used by his cows in southwest Las Animas County, lying on its side on the south edge of a stream that runs through his property, The Range said.
“When I went over and checked out the body, I noticed she was laying on her side and I kind of looked underneath by where her udders are,” Duran told the paper. “I picked up her leg and I just saw the big hole where the udders had been removed, and I knew by prior experience this was a mutilation.”
Duran, who operates the 30-head cattle ranch in addition to working as a special education instructor, said a similar mutilation had occurred in the same pasture back in 1995 or 1996, The Range said.
“Same thing in that one — they removed the uterus and the udders,” Duran recalled. “That one had horns and they pulled the horns off, the shell off the base of the skull … those were pulled out and left on the side of that cow.”
Duran also said similar mutilations had occurred to cattle owned by a neighbor in 1998 and 1999, but thosse incidents weren’t reported to authorities, he told The Range.
Las Animas County’s acting Sheriff Derek Navarette told the paper his department investigates such mutilations as a criminal matter but that no convictions or even arrests had been made in any of the cases.
“There’s no evidence of people or anything being around the livestock … no prints of any kind,” Navarette told The Range. “The same type of mutilation is occurring all across the United States … it’s basically the same type of procedure. We don’t know what it is.”
A large number of cattle mutilations occurred in Las Animas County and in Colfax County across the state line in New Mexico from the mid-1970s to the mid-1990s, but no official explanation has ever been given for the phenomenon, The Range said.
A History Channel crew was in Colfax County last month filming segments for a program about the mutilations, the paper reported.
“It’s happened now twice,” Duran told The Range. “It’s just weird.”