A retired government worker who spent decades fighting animal depredation in the Rocky Mountains recently reflected on a phenomenon that puzzled him throughout his career: cattle mutilations. For a staggering 42 years, Mike Hoggan was reportedly a hunter and trapper for the U.S. Department of Agriculture Wildlife Services in Montana and Nevada. Throughout his storied career, he kept a journal wherein he detailed some of the more unusual and exciting stories from his time taking down various creatures, such as bears and coyotes, that had preyed on ranchers' cattle.

Following his retirement, Hoggan turned those recollections into the recently released book Between Predator & Prey: Forty-Two Years a Government Hunter. Included among the recollections featured in the memoir is a chapter that the retired trapper was initially reticent to include as it centered around his encounters with cattle mutilation cases. Explaining that ranchers in search of loss compensation often called on him to examine downed animals to determine what caused the incident, Hoggan conceded that these particular moments left him scratching his head. "All I could ever say was that I didn't know what had caused them," the seasoned investigator recounted, "but that they definitely weren't the work of predators or cults."

At a recent book launch event in Montana, Hoggan further expanded on the peculiar phenomenon he "just couldn't explain." He indicated that, around 30 years ago, every summer saw curious clusters of around 10 to 12 mystifying mutilations before the activity would suddenly stop. "It’s just a pretty strange deal" he mused, noting that the incidents occurred on locked properties with no sign of human activity left behind after the strange slayings. Additionally, echoing insights from independent researchers who have studied the phenomenon, he observed that the unfortunate animals were cut with surgical precision and that scavengers eschewed their remains.