FBI file: Animal Mutilation, Animal Mutilation Part 02

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# ALEXANDER COCKBURN

Rippers of the range

s so often happens with crime, it's a question of viewpoint, really. Given the rate of human slaughter in any large American city, it might not seem too important that between April and September of this year 129 cattle were mutilated in the state of Colorado. As a matter of fact, in 1974, there were about 3,750,000 cattle grazing in Colorado and around 37,000 of these died of natural causes, so we are not talking about an event of prime importance to the ranching business.

But no rancher in Colorado is taking this comfortable view of the matter. What the ranchers dislike is the idea of driving across their pastures and finding, as one did last August, a dead bull with its penis, rectum, testicles, tongue and an eye excised with surgical deftness and absolutely no trace visible of the surgeon or surgeons involved.

Over the past couple of years, hundreds of such mutilation have occurred in Colorado, Minnesota, Nebraska, Kansas, Oklahoma, Wyoming, South Dakota, Montana, New Mexico and Texas. In fact, if you follow this kind of thing, you may have noticed the odd item in the newspapers about the cattle-cutting craze. I'd seen such items myself but not taken too much of an interest till my good friend Ed Sanders told me last fall that some anonymous person in Sacramento had sent him a cow's tongue in the mail. Now, Sanders is the author of The Family, a fine and eerie book about the Manson group. Like myself, he had taken only a passing interest in cattle mutilations. The arrival in June of what he likes to call the lingua bovina excisa, packed in a shoe box, at the office of his literary agent escalated his attention remarkably. In June, you may remember, Sacramento was rendered the more colorful by two young Mansonian ladies called Squeaky Fromme and Sandra Good strolling about in their red robes.

Back in 1970, when Sanders was compiling material about the Manson group, ritual murders, and other diverting practices in California, he'd examined the case of a ritual de

capitation of a goat in Topanga Canyon. Five years later the question seemed to be whether excised animal parts had, so to speak, become part of the currency of satanic groups; whether a sliced cow's tongue was now an essential part of the ritualist's working equipment.

So far, after some investigation, Sanders has found nothing to connect the tongue from Sacramento with the mutilations in the Midwest. But he did, in the course of a drive across the country, find himself standing in the office of the sheriff of Elbert County, Colorado, looking at a Polaroid photograph. It showed a cow with its udder bag and rectum removed. The cow had been pregnant and the photograph also showed a

long, thin, unborn calf's neck and head, which the mutilators had cut and pulled out of its mother's uterus. The calf's tongue had been cut out. As Sanders later remarked to me, he could understand why the ranchers were getting upset.

The mutilation case histories make for depressing reading. In Minnesota, in the fall of 1974, a young cow was found dead with its sexual organs, one ear and the udder removed. The incision to remove the udder was made in the form of a diamond. The previous spring, the mutilation mob had turned up in Nebraska. Among its victims, a calf with its sex organs removed and its body drained of blood. On we go to Oklahoma to find reports of a Hereford cow killed by strangulation or a blow on the neck.