- SALIQUELLO, Argentina - Daniel
Belot has seen his share of dead cows.
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- As a veterinarian in the heart of the cow-full pampas,
Belot has written off bovine deaths to causes as diverse as foot-and-mouth
disease, bloat, lightning, killer bees and cattle thieves who butcher their
loot in place, a crime that has become increasingly common as Argentina's
economic crisis has extended to the countryside.
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- Then, in April, he discovered a case that stumped him.
A rancher had found a nearly 1,000-pound Aberdeen Angus lying on its belly
"like a rabbit," in Belot's words. The left side of its face
around the jaw was gone, the hide cut away in two straight lines meeting
at a 90-degree angle.
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- Its tongue, pharynx and larynx were missing. Muscles
and ligaments had been removed from the jawbones, leaving them spotless.
There was no blood on the animal or nearby; nor were there signs of scavengers
or predators.
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- "I had never seen anything like it before,"
says Belot, who works for Argentina's animal health agency, Senasa, in
the sleepy town of Saliquello. "How were those cuts made? When? Why?"
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- Three months later, Belot has no answers. Across this
country's immense, grassy plains, Argentina's renowned beef cattle are
turning up dead, mutilated in ways that have baffled experts and spooked
ranchers.
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- Since Belot detected the first mutilation in April, nearly
200 more have been reported in the area, in addition to a scattering of
cases from as far away as Patagonia and Uruguay.
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- Most cows have the same missing parts as the first one
examined by Belot. But all the mutilations share an uncanny similarity:
Organs, flesh and skin have been removed in angular or neatly curved cuts
that leave no blood and clean, dry bones.
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- "The type of incisions do not coincide with any
infectious or contagious disease that we know," says Alberto Pariani,
a veterinarian at the University of La Pampa who has examined 40 mutilated
cows. "When animals eat, they rip, they tear. They don't cut.
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- "Everyone who has experience working on the ranch
says the same thing: No animal can do this."
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- Blame has been pinned on everything from ravenous rodents
to satanic cults, but in the farmhouses and small towns that dot the pampas,
the paranormal is the No. 1 suspect. Sure enough, the mutilations have
been accompanied by a spate of UFO sightings.
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- The mutilations are not without precedent. Since the
1960s, hundreds of mutilated animals have been found in the United States
with nearly identical characteristics - removal of organs in what appear
to be surgically precise cuts, no trace of blood, no tracks of humans or
animals, often with coinciding testimonies of strange lights.
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- Mutilation cases have been reported during the past year
in Montana and Oregon. The news media have evoked comparisons with the
legend of the chupacabras, literally "goat sucker," revived in
Puerto Rico several years ago when farm animals there were reportedly found
dead and bloodless with abnormal puncture wounds.
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- But according to an Argentine government-backed investigation,
the mutilations have an earthly explanation. A team of university veterinarians
working with specialists from Senasa and the National Institute of Agricultural
Technology recently announced that they had caught the mysterious cow mutilator.
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- The culprit's name: Oxymycterus, commonly known as the
long-nosed mouse. The theory holds that the cows die from disease or other
natural causes, not unusual in winter, and are then set upon by scavengers,
including foxes and birds. But it is the hungry long-nosed mouse, with
its four potent incisors, that is allegedly responsible for nibbling off
flesh and hide in circular and linear cuts.
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- To prove their hypothesis, veterinarians at the national
university in the city of Tandil placed dead cows in areas where some of
the mutilations had been discovered. Four or five days later, the cows
were left with "lesions exactly the same" as those discovered
in the mutilated cows.
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- The announcement was made at a Buenos Aires news conference,
where reporters were shown a video of mice crawling through a carcass and
chomping a cow tongue on a laboratory table. National media coverage of
the mutilations has effectively ended since the news conference.
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- But many experts and local veterinarians remain unconvinced
by the government-endorsed conclusion. One question the university team
has not answered is why the mice, or any scavenger for that matter, would
consume the hide around the jaw instead of first devouring the rest of
the cow's softer flesh and innards.
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- Another chink in the theory: Some cows have been found
mutilated hours after being seen intact, leaving scant time for the mice
to remove the organs.
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- Nobody, from ranchers to biologists specializing in rodents,
has ever seen mice feed on a cow carcass.
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- The Tandil veterinarians suggest that a demographic explosion
combined with an unusually cold winter have driven the mice to change their
diet from worms and slugs to cow flesh. But in many cases, witnesses have
seen no signs of mice or any other scavengers. Raising even greater doubts,
the long-nosed mouse does not inhabit the province of La Pampa, where dozens
of mutilations have been found.
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- The team of university and government specialists limited
their study to five counties in the province of Buenos Aires. They did
not make available the details of their investigation.
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- But if the mouse theory has its holes, the possibility
of human involvement seems even more unlikely. Police have found no footprints
or tire tracks near the animals. Nor are there signs of struggle; cows
killed by predators or humans usually leave kick marks as they take their
final gasps. In some cases, the cows were discovered behind fences and
locked gates or miles from the nearest road.
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- Nobody has seen anyone or anything out of the ordinary,
except weird lights in the sky.
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- "We are totally disoriented," says Oscar Raul
Arce, the chief of the provincial police in northern La Pampa. "What
is really striking is that no clues, or prints or blood have been left.
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- "What's going on here is perhaps beyond our ability
to understand."
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- For most people out on the pampas, where cows outnumber
humans in the range of 10-to-1, something strange is responsible for the
mutilations, and it's not the long-nosed mouse.
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- "I'd always heard stories of people who had seen
lights and strange things," says rancher Raul Vargas, 39, standing
over a mutilated calf found the day before a half-mile from his farmhouse.
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- "But if I hadn't seen this with my own eyes, I wouldn't
have believed it."
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- Copyright © 2002, The Baltimore Sun
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- http://www.sunspot.net/news/nationworld/bal-te.journal23
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