McMullen: Cow crimes might be an alien concept

I love this “Nixle” service. Every e-mail it sends me starts out with, “Hi Travis McMullen.” Now I suppose it’s a little odd to be greeted by a computer service, but you’ve got to appreciate the sentence of small talk before it gets down to business. 

Road closings, weather advisories and police reports are only some of the things that arrive in my inbox. 

The messages were rather mundane until I received one at 11:24 p.m. on Monday, Feb. 2 (which is, it seems to me, an odd time to receive a Nixle update). This communiqué spoke of a couple of cattle mutilations that had occurred outside of Sedalia.

“Be on lookout!” insisted the e-mail, “Suspicious activity around farm fields — 2 cases of cattle slaughtered south of Sedalia in past week.”

There’s someone or something out there doing bad things to our livestock. Notice that the word used is “slaughtered” instead of “mutilated.” I guess that word was used because the scenes that were reported looked more like the early stages of a giant steak dinner than the leavings of any sort of extraterrestrials. 

Maybe it was closer to mutilation than slaughter, but the Pettis County Sheriff’s Department didn’t want to make the people think that there was something otherworldly going on. Unfortunately, anytime something slightly strange happens to a cow standing in a field, people start whispering about aliens. 

Modern legend says that above most other creatures, aliens love to perform experiments on cows. They don’t seem to care about whales, giant squids, gila monsters, polar bears, raccoons or anything else — except humans and cows. 

There’s all sorts of possible reasons. Maybe they don’t have anything like a cow on their planet, but they do have their own alternate version of everything else in our animal kingdom. Perhaps the aliens share a lot of physiology with the common earth cow and must do extensive research to see just how compatible the two species are. 

But I guess the most obvious reason why cows are “abducted” so often would probably be ease of access. They spent most of their time meandering around open fields, they wouldn’t put up much of a fight and there’s usually a whole lot of them in one area so it would be relatively easy to catch one of them in the tractor beam even if you’ve been hitting the alien ale a bit too hard.

[sic] “Ive heard of Cow mutations from Ufo’s Before no Joke,” wrote tammy1874, a commenter on The Sedalia Democrat Web site. As of this writing, there are three people who have cried alien in the comments section of the news story that was written about the cattle incidents, though I imagine that most of it is being said in a tongue-in-cheek sort of way.

All of that said, I think of two potential perpetrators when I hear about cattle-based violence. Aliens, of course, and the Chupacabra. I’ve always found earthbound mystique to be much more interesting than imported mystique. 

We need to allow for equal opportunity when it comes to just who or what could have messed with our cows. The Chupacabra, while mostly seen in places like Central America and Texas, has also been reported as far north as Turner, Maine, and as far east as Russia. There are even Chupacabra sightings reported in the Philippines. He (or they, or even she, I suppose) seems to get around pretty well and it wouldn’t be unreasonable to suppose that it made its way to central Missouri just a few days ago.

The legends tell of an odd creature that’s either a giant, bipedal lizard or a mutated dog or some combination of both that loves to suck all the blood out of cows, dogs, goats and whatever it can find that it can overtake. There are photos circulating of cows with perfectly round holes where organs have been removed. (Though, to be fair, it’s just as likely that some modern day Jack the Cow Ripper is going around and entertaining himself by confusing the natives.)

The Chupacabra is sometimes reported as employing a surgical, even human-like precision in its attacks. A Chupacabra attack could explain why the attacks were reported as “slaughter” instead of “mutilation.” I guess an advanced race of aliens could probably be more “surgical” than a wild, mythical beast, but since the word mutilation is usually used when referring to aliens, I don’t think they bother to make their experiment wounds look pretty.

It was probably just a couple of guys who got drunk and couldn’t find anything better to do than cut up a cow or two. The most boring answer is usually the correct one, after all.

In any case, I guess there’s only one thing to do: Watch your livestock carefully. We could have some sick individuals out there who have found that they love nothing more in life than cutting up cows. Maybe we could rehabilitate them into butchers — maybe they are already butchers who love it so much that there just aren’t enough cows to butcher without doing it illegally.

Keep an eye on those cows.