A couple of days ago someone emailed me and asked if Britain was home to cattle and animal mutilation reports and incidents that were similar to those which have been reported from the United States in the last forty years?

Well…we certainly do get reports of animals mutilated in a distinctly sinister fashion in the UK. My book On the Trail of the Saucer Spies discusses such cases, as does Jonathan Downes’ The Owlman and Others.

But whereas in the US theories for such events usually focus their attentions on aliens and clandestine military-related bio-warfare activity, in the UK the incidents are generally perceived as being the work of the archetypal “Satanic Cult.”

Nevertheless, since such reports most assuredly do exist; and the inquiring e-mailer that brought the question up is a regular reader of this blog, I figured it would be a good time to reveal a couple of relatively recent reports that may be of interest. 

In October 2005, farmer Daniel Alford of Sampford Spiney, near Tavistock, Devon, England made a shocking discovery on the wilds of Dartmoor: namely, six sheep, horrifically slaughtered, with their eyeballs removed and their necks viciously broken. More sinister is the fact that the corpses of the animals had been deliberately laid out in the form of a Pagan symbol near a series of ancient standing-stones.

Alford was convinced that this was the work of occultists – primarily because this was not the first occasion upon which he had made such a gruesome find. In January 2005, he had stumbled upon five sheep, killed in a similar fashion and spread out in a circle, only half a mile away. Interestingly, on both occasions the animal attacks had occurred at the height of a full moon.

Alford said at the time: “This was a sacrifice – they had their necks broken. Initially, when you think of sacrifices you think sharp knives and slit throats. That wasn’t the case here. If they had killed them and taken them, I would have accepted it more. Just to outright kill them and leave them is just a waste.”

And as Alford perceptively noted: “You wouldn’t just get kids catching sheep like that. Someone’s got to know what they’re on about.” Alford was not wrong: somebody most definitely did know what they were doing, and the attacks were set to continue.

In late June 2006, yet more strange sacrifices of sheep on Dartmoor occurred, again near Tavistock, and specifically on moorland at a location called Pork Hill. Once more, the necks of the animals had been broken, and their eyes had been taken. This time, however, the tongues of the animals had also been removed.

RSPCA [The Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals] Inspector Becky Wadey commented: “These sheep must have been rounded up on the open moor by whoever carried out this barbaric attack. That would have required a number of people and potentially been quite a spectacle.”

Wadey added: “The bodies were found on open, exposed ground very close to the road, so somebody must have seen something, even if they did not realise at the time that it was suspicious.”