For Clint Snook, the vexing mystery facing a Colorado ranch family is eerily familiar. Like them, he’s had cattle die suddenly and mysteriously.
“We never did figure out exactly what it was,” Snook, who ranches near Devils Tower, told Cowboy State Daily.
During two summers several years back, he had cattle bafflingly fall over dead in a particular pasture. Roughly 20 cows died each time, he said.
That mirrors what the Higgs family of Fremont County, Colorado, is going through. Over the course of several hours on May 8, 15 of their cattle – nearly all of them first-time heifers (new mother cows), fell over, suffered seizures and died.
The family, a veterinarian and others haven’t figured out what killed the cattle.
‘I Stampeded Them Out Of That Pasture’
Snook said he can identify with the Higgs family.
“It (a sudden cattle die-off) happened to me twice, a couple of years apart,” he said.
Snook said he’d never had any problem with some of his cattle in a certain pasture every spring and early summer.
Until one year, he rode in to check on them and found many of them scattered around dead.
“I just found a bunch of them dead. And I just panicked and stampeded the herd out of that pasture,” he said.
His best guess is that some sort of plant had poisoned the cattle, but he said he couldn’t determine what it was.
‘They Dropped’
Snook figured it was a strange and unfortunate one-off loss.
But then it happened again, in the same pasture.
Whatever plant, or whatever else, that killed the cows did so quickly, he said.
“It killed them instantly, whatever it was. They just dropped,” he said.
A state inspector came and investigated the pasture but couldn’t determine exactly what killed the cattle. He also concluded it was some sort of plant.
By then, Snook had had enough.
“I just quit using that pasture this time of year,” he said.
He turned that part of the property over to his brother, who later sold it.
Was It Aliens?
The Higgs took a big financial hit from their cows’ deaths.
The immediate loss, just the value of the cattle that died, is probably $50,000 to $70,000. Factoring in the loss of the calves the heifers would have produced, had they lived, the long-term costs could be $250,000.
Snook said he didn’t suffer nearly as big a financial blow.
His cattle that died were under contract to be purchased by a feed lot, and the lot owners “were understanding” about the cows’ sudden, unexpected deaths.
Snook jokingly mentioned that extraterrestrial beings could be to blame for the deaths of his cattle.
Devils Tower was prominently featured as the landing site of a gigantic alien spaceship in the classic Sci-Fi movie “Close Encounters of the Third Kind.” So, the monument is often whimsically associated with aliens.
Snook played up on that when talking about losing his cattle.
“Maybe it was the aliens that did it,” Snook said with a laugh. “But I don’t know why they would decide to pick on me.”
Mark Heinz can be reached at mark@cowboystatedaily.com.
