Sunday 11 April 2010

A Sheep Mutilation in Perthshire?

I came across this story on the Scotsman website:

Police are appealing for information after a sheep was killed and mutilated in the Killin area.
The sheep was killed sometime between 6pm on Saturday 27 and 8.30am on Sunday March 28.

A Central Scotland Police spokeswoman said: "The sheep's carcass appears to have been taken from the scene. There was evidence of the carcass being moved over a distance. All that remained was the heart, lungs and two unborn lambs which were discovered nearby."

The discovery was made near to Pier Road.

Police are keen to hear from any fishermen or walkers who may have seen anything suspicious.

Of course, the report's too vague to put this into the high strangeness bucket. It had piqued my interest partly as it occurred in my home county of Perthshire and partly as the general area is rich in folkore, including fairy cattle and hellhounds. I recall a tale of some poachers spending the night in a bothy in the Loch Tay area and encountering small ball of light that drew blood from one of them, but can't find the reference- I'm sure I first read it in Jacque Vallee's Dimensions, but a flick through that and Geoff Holder's Guide To Mysterious Perthshire has failed to bring it up- I'll post it once I locate it.
I'd also not long listened to this episode of the Paracast, which was a discussion on the mutilation phenomena. One of the participants was Phillip Hoyle of the UK based Animal Pathology Field Unit, an organisation I have to shamefully admit I'd never heard of until their appearance on Danny Dyer: I Believe in UFOs! He puts forward the theory that many of these mutilations in the UK are part of a secret monitoring program to test for pathogens in the food chain, which seems like a viable explanation, though I do wonder why whoever's behind it doesn't just buy the animals and do whatever they've got to do behind closed doors? Could it be they actually want people to come across the caracasses?
An interesting point made by Christopher O'Brien in the same episode is that mutilation waves tend to start with high strangeness ones but then later ones will have more hall marks of human activity. Inspiration or training?
As strange events tend to clump together, I'd been idly thinking about this blog post for a week or so, and lo and behold, there's been reports of more sheep mutilations in the English county of Shropshire. Nick Redfern's written an interesting piece on it here.
Be interesting to see if it's co-incidence or the start of a flap?

No comments:

Post a Comment