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. I Address | City Exciting, innovative design. Eagle ’76is genuine pewter: design allows for flexible adjustment to fit any wrist size. Only $15.95. . Cochran Company - 4558 Coldwater Canyon Avenue Studio City, California 91604 ——_ os or oo Please send me___Eagle ‘76 at $15.9 plus 50¢ for postage and handling? My full payment is enclosed (make check payable te Cochran}. | Name r State Zip {_ California residents add 6% sales tax. U} Cr*me. . Rippers of the range ms so often happens with crime, it's a question of viewpoint, really. Given ™ the rate of human slaugh- im” kwaaa ter in any Jarge 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 natu- ral causes, so we are not talking about an event of prime importance to the ranching business. But no rancher in Colorado fs tak- | ing this comfortable view of the mat- ter, What the ranchers dislike is the and finding, as one did last August, a dead buil 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, hun- dreda af aueh mutilatisr - Grecs OF Suen MUlacior. hava or. aave ot curred in Colorado, Minnesota, Ne- braska, 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 my- self, he had taken only a passing in- terest in cattle mutilations. The ar- rival in June of what he likes to call the lingua bovina excise, packed in a shoe box, at the office of his literary agent escalated his attention remark- ably. In June, you may remember, Sacramento was rendered the more | colorful by two young Mansonian ladies called Squeaky Fromme and [ Sandra Gocd strolling about in their ]| red robes. | Back in 1970, when Sanders. was { compiling material about the Manson group, ritual murders, and other di- [| verting practices in California, he'd [{ examined the case of a ritual de- ALEXANDER COCKBURN _ across the country, find himself stand- idea of driving across their pastures” capitation of a goat in Topanga Can- yon. 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 ‘vas Row an essential part of the ritual- ist’s working equipment. So far, after some investigation, Sanders has found nothing to con- nmect the tengue from Sacramento with the mutilations in the Midwest. But he did, in the course of a drive ing in the office of the sheriff of Elbert County, Colorado, locking ata Polaroid photograph. It showed a cow with its udder bag and rectum removed. The cow had been pregnant and the photograph also showed a . gi 4 6 , ¥ 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 Minne- sota, in the fall of 1974, a young cow was found dead with its sexual or- gans, 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 jts sex or- gans 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, | 1