Grim smiles: The enduring mystery of cattle mutilations in Montana

One was waiting for Lisa Schmidt earlier this summer, when she found a yearling steer stiff and stretched on the grass. With ravens overhead, the grinning yearling looked up at the seasoned rancher through a fly-choked eye.

Schmidt, co-founder and operator of A Land of Grass Ranch outside of Conrad, had seen her share of stirs and oddities while making the rounds to check on her cattle and sheep, like the morning she woke up to meet a grizzly bear parked on her picnic table. She last saw the 900-pound yearling on a Saturday, where it was healthy and grazing with the other cattle in the summer pasture. By Monday, a portion of the animal’s face known as the mask was stripped away, revealing the bone and teeth of its jawline.

The loss of cattle is a reality in ranching, whether to disease, the elements or predation.

What was unique about June 28? Schmidt had no explanation for what peeled the skin from her yearling’s jaw, punctured a hole in its chest, clipped its ear from head and pulled its penis out of its rectum. After nearly two decades of running a ranch, Schmidt and her lacerated yearling became the latest editions to a mystery stretching back generations. That question?

What’s carving up cattle in the state’s loneliest places? There are no answers, just gruesome pieces of a puzzle.

“I know that I don’t know everything,” Schmidt said, “and I know that things happen and I don’t know why, but this feels like an unfinished story.”

‘Some kind of strange witchcraft cult’

Cattle mutilations, shorthand for the broader phenomenon of dead livestock across the United States found with inexplicably precise cuts to their bodies, gained national attention back in the ’70s.

Dead cows in the prairies and mountains of the Western U.S. dovetailed with public fervor over the occult in the Age of Aquarius. Interest in conspiratorial, insidious government operations in the wake of Watergate ensured that cattle mutilations were elevated from local curiosities to nationwide topics of discussion and investigation.

The first case in Montana that attracted the attention of the local press occurred in August 1974, in Cascade County. By the end of 1977, deputies in Cascade County and the surrounding region had responded to dozens of mutilations, many of which were detailed in “Mystery Stalks the Prairie,” by Montana journalist Roberta Donovan and Keith Wolverton with the Cascade County Sheriff’s Office. Other mutilations were also reported out of ranches near Billings and Miles City.

Consistent details in the killings were the removal of tongues, genitals, udders and rectums. In many cases, some or all of the cattle’s masks had also been removed. Most of the ranchers interviewed in Montana newspapers such as the Billings Gazette and the Helena Independent Record said the mutilations were done with “surgical” precision. No bite marks or signs of decomposition gave any indication of predators or insects eating away the organs.

Documentation filed by the FBI showed cattle mutilation occurring contemporaneously in North and South Dakota, Minnesota, Nebraska and Oklahoma. The cases all had similarities. Sex organs, facial features and ears seemingly surgically removed. Some carcasses were completely drained of blood, without a drop spilled on the ground.

In Hastings, Nebraska, five cattle were reported killed in Madison County, according to FBI filings. The local sheriff, Marvin Adams, claimed the carcasses he investigated were the result of people, and in his opinion, the work of a cult. A deputy sheriff in Antelope County similarly stated that five head of cattle had been killed. Unlike the Madison County deputy, he said there was no definitive proof of the involvement of people.

In a letter to the director of the FBI from the bureau’s Minnesota office, a state veterinarian assessed one case. Foxes or varmints had chewed off the soft tissues and sex organs, he concluded. He claimed the use of a fox’s side teeth can result in scissor-like cuts. His assessment mentioned the draining of blood, but he didn’t offer an explanation as to how.

In 1974, Nebraska Sen. Carl T. Curtis wrote to then-FBI Director Clarence Kelley, asking for federal assistance “regarding the series of incidents stretching from Oklahoma to Nebraska in which cattle have been dismembered in some kind of strange witchcraft cult.”

Senators, state bureaucrats and ranchers were reaching out to the FBI as early as 1975, imploring agents to help them find answers. A report published by the FBI in 1979 concluded that predators had caused the mutilations, disputing notions of either a “strange witch cult,” “rival ranchers” or “government agents” killing cattle. At a conference held in Denver following the report’s release, an investigator from Montana disagreed with the findings, saying at the very least the mutilations were deliberate, and not the work of predators. That investigator was not identified in documents recorded by the FBI.

With ranchers and professionals confounded, the speculation on what could be cutting up cattle was limited only by the imagination: the feds using bovines as 900-pound guinea pigs for their prototype weaponry, sadistic occultists trying to impress Moloch or the odd cryptid stalking the prairie.

‘Here’s a weird one’

Although FBI agents don’t trouble themselves anymore with inquiries into the phenomenon of cattle mutilations, the questions and speculations have remained. It’s a daunting task to get a grasp on how many reports of mutilated cattle have emerged out of a given area since the 1970s. There’s running searches through newspaper archives, or going rancher-to-rancher for their input. Short of those options, try the local sheriff.

Back in Montana, Meagher County Sheriff Jon Lopp started as a deputy in 1997 and within a year, he was documenting his first cattle mutilation. A man reported finding two of his cows dead near an access road. Their tongues and utters were missing, and there were no signs of tracks or predators.

“But what struck him as odd,” Lopp said this summer at his office in White Sulphur Springs, “was nothing else would touch them. The bears and scavengers wouldn’t mess with them … We had one south of town. Hadn’t been touched in at least four days.”

In a career spanning nearly three decades, Lopp estimated he’s photographed about 15 cattle found dead and inexplicably maimed. It’s been two years since his last case, Lopp said, rapping his knuckles on his desk. Since the switch from film to digital cameras, Lopp has maintained a dossier on cases of cattle mutilations he’s personally investigated. In an interview with the Gazette in early July he went through photo after graphic photo on his computer.

In almost every case, Lopp said, the ranchers found their cattle on their right side, with cuts taken from the left side of their masks, or missing their tongues and esophagi.

“If it’s a cow, they take the udder,” he said. “We did have a bull and a steer done once, and they took the penis and the nut sack off of both of them. Another strange detail? Probably 90% of them are pointing at 129 degrees to the southeast.”

Head southeast from at least White Sulphur Sprints and you run through more ranchland, the Crazy Mountains and eventually the Absaroka-Beartooth Wilderness.

Speaking from his own experience in agriculture and as a coroner, Lopp described the signs of predation and scavenging. Teeth and claws pull at the skin and flesh. What remains is stressed and stringy, with punctures through the hide and into muscle. Lopp pulled up a photo of a piece of hide he’d taken off a cow.

“The cuts are always straight. All one cut, zhhhhip,” he said, tracing the length of the pierced hide with his finger. “And it doesn’t go down past the tissue of the skin.”

Even with a scalpel, Lopp said there would be some sign that the hide was sawed, as seen in the waviness in the tissue, warped when he cut out a sample. He doesn’t know what kind of tools can make the cuts that he’s seen.

“Here’s a weird one,” said Lopp, pointing to a photo of a cow with most of the right side of its mask missing. It stared back at Lopp’s digital camera lens through a hollow eye socket. Among cattle mutilations, the missing tongue, esophagus and eye did not distinguish this 2016 case as weird.

The weird part was about 25 feet away from the carcass. Something had shorn off the switch at the tip of the animal’s tail and formed the hairs into a triangle in the grass. It was pointing north.

“I have no idea what causes it. I’ve been dealing with this sh—t for over 25 years, and have never found anything remotely related to what would be causing it,” Lopp said, a little over a week after Schmidt found her steer dead.

‘The right place at the right time’

Schmidt, too, doubts her yearling was the victim of predation. Reinforcing that doubt was the word of recently retired government hunter and trapper Mike Hoggan. One role Hoggan served during his more than 42 years with the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Wildlife Services Program was verifying for ranchers and the department whether a predator had killed livestock.

He’s seen enough grizzly, wolf, coyote and mountain lion kills to read a carcass like a crime scene and determine the culprit. None of the predators in northwestern Montana slice the tongue out in a single, clean cut, or swipe an ear without leaving a jagged tear in the surrounding flesh. In his recently published memoir, “Between Predator and Prey: Forty-Two Years A Government Hunter,” Hoggan dedicated an entire chapter to cattle mutilations.

“I’ve probably seen more cattle mutilations than others, because of my job,” said Hoggan, who spent nearly every day of his career inspecting dead livestock.

Hoggan recounted in his book several cases bearing similarities to those documented since the 70s, with cattle on the ground with half the skin of their heads missing and their tongues and throats gutted. In most cases, Hoggan said, the ground was surprisingly undisturbed, as though the animals had just laid down and gone to sleep. Hoggan’s job in determining the cause of death for livestock provided additional, anomalous details in some cases.

In 2019, he responded to a call from ranchers with a big calf on their property. It had been cut clean in half. The back half was missing, and there was no blood to be found. Its left ear was missing, and with it the calf’s identification tag. Hoggan performed a necropsy, finding no signs of the animal having been shot or attacked. When Hoggan pulled out the intact heart, it was dry. He finally checked the mouth. No tongue.

Months later, those same ranchers called Hoggan with an update. They’d accounted for all of their calves, determining that the mutilated carcass wasn’t even one of their own. It belonged to someone else and somehow ended up in an area with no public access miles away from the main road.

“When a predator kills livestock,” Hoggan said, “there’s a lot of evidence.”

The first time a grizzly bear got to her livestock, Schmidt said, it was right after lambing season. The lambs that survived were huddled in a corner, and there was a visceral mess of dead sheep otherwise. Like Hoggan, Schmidt knows how to recognize the signs of predation, be it a grizzly slapping an animal, breaking its shoulders and hips, coyotes going right for the throat or wolves biting at a cow’s legs to bring it to the ground and go for the neck. Schmidt’s yearling didn’t have any of those signs.

Just days after finding her steer, Schmidt wrote about the experience on her blog that was also picked up by the Great Falls Tribune and other publications. As doubtful as she is about a predator getting her calf, she’s just as incredulous that it was a space invader or a spook fast-roping from a black helicopter. She does still welcome hearing anyone’s theories, but she isn’t too anxious for answers.

“It would have been handy to have a camera there,” said Schmidt, who by next year will have spent 20 years at her ranch outside of Conrad. “But how do you watch everything? And really, I don’t want to. I don’t want to have cameras all over the place. I don’t even have the location thing turned on with my phone. There’s a magic and mystery to being in the right place at the right time.”