‘Not One Drop of Blood’ documents cattle mutilation in rural Oregon

When public radio reporter Anna King first heard that ranchers in remote areas of rural Oregon were finding the bodies of cows and bulls drained of blood and mutilated, she immediately began to investigate. What she found could have provided the script for an episode of “The X Files.” Various arms of law enforcement had investigated this phenomenon, but the mystery remained unsolved. The NPR story she filed in 2019 drew more than a million hits.

King ultimately teamed up with two New York-based documentary filmmakers, Jackson Devereux and Lachlan Hinton, who found the story compelling and wanted to collaborate with her to explore a full-length feature film. After an intense three years of research, interviews, filming and editing, “Not One Drop of Blood” premiers at the Treefort Festival in Idaho this week. King joins to tell us more about what the documentary reveals about the bizarre phenomenon — and how it’s affecting life in the ranching communities of Harney County.

Note: The following transcript was transcribed digitally and validated for accuracy, readability and formatting by an OPB volunteer.

Dave Miller: From the Gert Boyle Studio at OPB, this is Think Out Loud. I’m Dave Miller. In 2019, public radio reporter Anna King filed a story for NPR about a ranch in Harney County. Five young bulls had been drained of blood and some of their body parts had been precisely removed. Her story, which was at the time just the most recent iteration of a decades-long mystery, received more than a million hits.

It eventually led Anna to team up with two documentary filmmakers. The team spent three years on their project. The resulting feature-length documentary, “Not One Drop of Blood,” is going to have its theatrical premiere this Friday at the Treefort Festival in Boise. It’s both a look at the gruesome mystery of cattle mutilation and a broader portrait of life in Harney County.

Anna King joins us now to talk about it. Anna, welcome back.

Anna King: Dave, thanks for having me on.

Miller: You grew up on a small ranch in Washington. Do you remember when you first heard about cattle mutilation?

King: Yeah, I was thinking back about that. When I was a girl, there were a couple of cattle that were shot from the road near our farm, and a horse, I believe. And that was the first time that, as a girl, I kind of got the idea that not everybody likes cattle and horses, that there’s some evil out there. And then later, my understanding widened out.

Miller: That seems still mystifying and obviously violent, but less truly eerie and mysterious than what we’re talking about here. Why are these called mutilations? Can you give us a sense for what is happening to these bulls and cows?

King: The cuts on these animals are precise. When they drop these animals on the ground, whoever or whatever is doing this, the animals don’t struggle. Usually when a big animal goes down and it’s still trying to breathe or live, they’ll scramble around on the ground. They’ll have hoof marks in the dust or in the dirt around them. And these animals just look like they fell over and that was it, that’s where they landed.

When you look at the totality of the meat and the waste that happens on these animals, it’s really sad, because they weigh tons of meat, Dave, and none of it gets taken away. The only things that we see a lot of time being taken away is the blood is gone, the tongues are gone, the sexual organs are often gone. And they’re all really precise, surgical cuts.

Miller: How far back do reports of these kinds of mutilations go?

King: Well, I read an article in The New Yorker that quoted that back in the 1800s this might have been happening. Also, there was a lot of cases during the 1970s, which I didn’t really dig into until the more recent cases that I found. When I was looking back into the history, they’ve got file drawers full of old articles about these kind of cases happening around Southeast Oregon, but also broader, up in Canada, around the United States, down into the border area of Mexico. So it’s really quite pervasive.

Miller: You, as I mentioned, did that story for NPR in 2019, and then these two Australian filmmakers based in Brooklyn, Jackson Devereux and Lachlan Hinton, contacted you saying they wanted to partner with you to make a film. Why did you end up saying yes?

King: Yeah, I really didn’t wanna say yes at first, because who gets a call from an Australian who lives in New York who wants to make a film about your little old public radio story, Dave? It just sounded too weird to be true. And especially at the time, I was getting all these emails and contacts from some colorful individuals that follow the cattle mutilation story. So this was kind of lumped in with a lot of emails I was getting. My inbox was full. I just didn’t have time for it. But they persisted. They kept contacting me, we had a couple of Zoom meetings, and then they said “We’re coming out to meet you.” And my parents were terrified. They’re like “Don’t meet these guys. What are you doing?”

But when I did meet them and we went out into the field together, we quickly learned that we just had a fascination with this case. And there was just genuine care about the people we were encountering. So it was a good partnership in the end.

Miller: I want to play folks a little clip from the movie. This is one of the managers at the Silvies Ranch where your first story focused on. This is Clint Weaver.

[Clip from “Not One Drop of Blood” playing]

Clint Weaver [recording]: We found one bull that had died. First, we thought it was just the bulls fighting, so we kind of chalked that up to a death. And then we found another one. And then we started looking at them a lot closer, and noticed that their testicles and their reproductive organs were gone. Then we drove up the creek and found the rest of ‘em. And it was the same, the testicles, reproductive organs, sometimes the tongues were gone. And then we knew something was going on, so then we called the law enforcement in.

[Clip ends]

Miller: The name of the movie is “Not One Drop of Blood.” You mentioned earlier that these animals don’t have blood in them. Why is the lack of blood such a big part of this mystery?

King: I mean, it’s just incredible to me. When I doctored animals back on our farm, you get a nick and it pours blood, and you’re covered in blood trying to doctor a horse. These big animals just have a lot of blood in their system to make everything run. And so when you drop a two-ton range bull on the ground, and then you find that there is no blood inside that carcass when you’re just on it a day or two later, it should be coagulated at the bottom of the animal. It should have drifted down to the bottom and be still there. And it’s just drained of blood. It’s just a huge mystery.

Not to mention, Dave, this blood is heavy. Think about carrying a five-gallon bucket full of water and then add some protein to it. It’s just really heavy. You think about a bull, you’d have to carry buckets and buckets of that blood away from the scene. And to not spill a drop is a hard task.

Miller: I’m glad you put it that way because I’ve just been assuming maybe one “easy” answer is that there is some sophisticated organ harvesting operation, that they have customers who like buying for, some pseudo-medicinal purpose, bull penises, and they think the blood is helpful too. So that’s the answer, they’re taking this blood. But you’re saying even that would logistically be a challenge.

King: Hey, I don’t know. I think all these theories, it’s a little bit up to who you are and what your perspective is, what you think the theory is sometimes. But what I know is blood is hard to carry, these bulls and the animals that I’ve seen dropped are in really remote country that’s really rough and really rugged. If you’re going over it with a four-wheeler, you’re going “duh-duh-duh-duh-duh.” I don’t know how they’re carrying this blood out and not spilling any.

Miller: What are some of the other aspects of these cases that have confounded investigators and journalists?

King: I think that what is really hard is that these cases, like I said, are often remote. So when you eventually come upon one of these animals, it can be a day or maybe even two or three days or a week later. It’s awful hard to do forensics because the dust has moved around, there could have been some, some sort of influence.

But what is really eerie, Dave, is that no scavengers get on these animals to what we’ve seen. And that’s like coyotes, buzzards, ravens, bugs, all kinds of stuff usually go after an animal as soon as it drops in the open country like this. But when we have come upon these animals, they just look pristine. A lot of times they just look like they’re ready to go to the county fair. They have a shiny coat and they don’t look like they’ve been touched. So it’s just confounding. These sheriff’s officers and people that are trying to unravel the mystery, even their best methods and their best techniques when given an animal, even that’s fresh as a day, is really tough to nail down the details.

Miller: So with all these mysteries, it’s maybe not a surprise that there are a variety of theories as to what’s happening. Let’s listen to one of them. This is Matt Ellibee with the Harney County Sheriff’s Department.

[Clip from “Not One Drop of Blood” playing]

Matt Ellibee: I mean, Sheriff and I, we’ve milled over ideas – devil worshippers, the occult. My personal opinion, it’s aliens. I don’t know how else to explain it. I mean, do I believe in aliens? I don’t know. I don’t believe we’re the only intelligent species in our universe. But unless there’s some super secret squirrel black op group out there able to do this stuff, I don’t know what else it’d be.

[Clip ends]

Miller: So we’ve got aliens there, which is a possibility. He’s saying not likely for the super secret squirrel op. What are some of the other theories that you’ve heard, maybe from those people who are emailing you years ago, or just from the people you’ve interviewed?

King: I mean it just runs the gamut. And everybody is really calcified into their own theory. Like my husband thinks it’s lightning and possums.

Miller: Lightning and possums?

King: Yeah, he’s from southeast Ohio, so that’s his theory.

[Laughter]

Miller: I love that that is supposed to make sense of the theory. So your husband says lightning and possums. What are some of the others?

King: Bugs, the chupacabra, Bigfoot, any kind of order of amoeba or microorganism that just melts them into the ground, they say.

And I don’t mean to make light of this. For ranchers and people that experience this, it is really serious. They’re losing animals that could bring them thousands and thousands of dollars on the market. It’s a real loss, and it’s very terrifying when it happens, even on a big ranch, which you consider your backyard.

I think one of the other theories that really is something to look at is just aliens, or some sort of other alternate life force that is out there in the universe.

Miller: For all the talk about cattle mutilations, I feel like what makes this movie really special is that it is at least as much about life in Harney County: the kids in the swimming pool, playing basketball, biking around town, scenes in the community theater, the church choir, people in their homes, lots of scenes of daily life for ranchers. What did you and your filmmaking partners want to show about life in Harney County?

King: I told these guys, these two Australians, Lachlan and Jackson … when they came over, I said, “I’m not gonna do this film with you if you don’t care about the people. Because these people I’ve known for years, and these communities I’ve reported out of for years, and I’m not gonna scald ‘em. I’m not gonna burn them with a bad story or a story that doesn’t depict how it really is in their life.” And they totally got it. They specialize in a type of film called vérité, which is basically that you just leave people alone and you try to record their natural life on film, and make a film that is very true to their normal existence. And there is a little bit of talking, but there’s a lot of moments of silence or just the wind and music, them working in their own life, doing their thing. I just think it shows the humanity of Harney County, the grit of Harney County, and the work that it takes to live this kind of life.

Miller: I don’t think this gives anything away to say that the film does not tie everything up neatly with the bow at the end and a clear explanation for this maybe century-old mystery. But I’m gonna put you on the spot, what’s your best guess or understanding for what in the world is happening?

King: When you roll out into the middle of Harney County somewhere on a desolate piece of road, and then you turn off that onto a gravel road and you go a piece, and then you get up on a two track a little bit further, and you stop your truck and you turn off the ignition, and you turn off the lights, and you open the door, and you look into the sky, it’s just awful big out there, Dave. And it’s really, really beautiful, the silence, the peace that you can find without technology, without cell phone range, just being out in the wide open world. I think there’s a lot of wide open, Dave. And I’m not sure I know all the answers.

Miller: Anna, I love your answer. Thanks very much.

King: Thank you for having me.

Miller: That’s Anna King, reporter for Northwest Public Broadcasting [and] one of the producers of this new documentary, “Not One Drop of Blood.”

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