
'Not One Drop of Blood': Cattle Mysteriously Mutilated in Oregon - ph0rque
https://www.npr.org/2019/10/08/767283820/not-one-drop-of-blood-cattle-mysteriously-mutilated-in-oregon
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mdorazio
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](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cattle_mutilation)

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snowwrestler
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.

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mdorazio
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.

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Bud
I bet they were mutilated using Occam's Razor.

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calebm
I see what you did there.

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jumpingmice
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](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cattle_mutilation)

~~~
taborj
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."

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dmt314159
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...](https://arstechnica.com/science/2018/08/us-invaded-by-savage-tick-
that-sucks-animals-dry-spawns-without-mating/)

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nan0
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...](https://www.nationalgeographic.com/environment/global-
warming/methane/)

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noodlesUK
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...

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erik_landerholm
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?

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jumpingmice
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?

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

[https://reddit.com/r/HighStrangeness/comments/d5mqw6/_/f0t0p...](https://reddit.com/r/HighStrangeness/comments/d5mqw6/_/f0t0p1l/?context=1)

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eBombzor
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?

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voldacar
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

