Aliens Steal Cattle



When UFOs fly over a farm, it always seems that the first thing they do is to beam up the farmer's cows with their Tractor Beam. Alien abduction accounts being what they are, you'd think they'd be more interested in the farmer, but where else would you test a tractor beam but on a farm?

This is actually a great example of a Dead Unicorn Trope. Like Anal Probing, "Cattle Abductions" were never really a trope in the first place; but they've become popular as a sort of satirical combination of Alien Abduction and cattle-mutilation stories. It's also a useful trope for designating aliens that are up to no good, but in a comedic or nonthreatening way (the sight gag of a mooing cow being tractor-beamed up into a flying saucer). Sometimes it's even played as a kind of obsessive-compulsive disorder: they just can't resist beaming the creature up.

Anime and Manga

 * In the manga prologue for the Fullmetal Alchemist Wii game, a photo of this is seen on the back of the newspaper. Interestingly, Arakawa often depicts herself as a cow, to show her Hokkaido roots.
 * Shows up in the ending credits to the anime version of Level E.

Comic Books

 * Cleaning up after alien cattle mutilations is seemingly one of the jobs of R-Complex in Scare Tactics. The Men in Black who have to do it do not enjoy the duty.
 * The Free Comic Book Day DC Kids anthology features the opening of an upcoming Billy Batson and The Power of Shazam comic in which cows are getting sucked up by flying saucers. One farmer cunningly disguises his cows with clothes and false beards. This doesn't work.

Film
"Mother: But the key meeting took place July 3rd, 1958, when the Air Force brought the space visitor to the White House for an interview with President Eisenhower. And Ike said, "Hey look, give us your technology, we'll give you all the cow lips you want.""
 * In the movie Sneakers, the conspiracy nut Mother claims that President Dwight D. Eisenhower did a deal with the aliens: They got all the cattle they wanted in exchange for alien technology.


 * Parodied badly in the film Zoom Academy For Superheroes, which features a sequence where the heroes use their flying saucer-looking ship to abduct a cow as a joke.
 * Parodied in the movie Mars Attacks!, when the first shown encounter the Martians have with earth involves a herd of cows. The twist is that, instead of abducting them, the aliens simply sets the herd on fire.
 * This scene was taken directly from one of the original Mars Attacks! trading cards, which predated the first alleged cases of paranormal cattle mutilation by years.
 * When the Martians actually do attack, they will be a highly advanced race evolved from cows.
 * In the Men in Black parody Men In White, the heroes use a cow as bait to find some aliens, because "everyone knows aliens are crazy about cows!" One of the flying saucers is even seen to have a "GOT COWS?" bumper sticker.

Folklore

 * It has its basis in Real Life legends and conspiracy theories, at any rate.
 * To clarify, "cattle mutilations" is a widely popular form of alien lore; its still being researched today with even government funded officers.
 * Maybe the aliens like a good steak?
 * Usually successful investigations point to some or other local carnivore. Or sometimes the cattle were stolen, or just escaped. It must be embarrassing when someone claims that alien stole some of their cattle, and a few hours later, a neighbor calls them and tells them the cattle are grazing on said neighbor's crops, down the road.
 * MUFON has a nod to this on their website; just mouse over the saucer on the top right.

Literature

 * The Discworld novel Hogfather features a throwaway reference in a footnote to some confused aliens mutilating corn and forming cows into a circle. "The truth may be out there, but lies are inside your head."
 * In the last Animorphs Megamorphs book (set mostly in an alternate timeline) Ax attempts to communicate with cows before humans, having falsely assumed them to be the dominant species. Since Andalites are four-legged grazers themselves (resembling centaurs) it's implied that he was just biased by their vaguely similar shape.
 * IIRC, it's also mentioned that there happened to be a lot of them around, and that's also why he figured they were in charge.

Tabletop Games

 * Steve Jackson Games' card game Illuminati and its collectible version Illuminati: New World Order (inspired by [[Illuminatus|the Illuminatus! trilogy) include a card called "Cattle Mutilators," which gives a bonus to the player who is playing as the UFOs.
 * Martian Fluxx features two "cow" Keepers.

Toys

 * The pinball table Attack From Mars: "They're taking our livestock and treasured historical monuments!"
 * The Abduction Lamp includes a bovine abductee.

Video Games

 * The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask, where aliens steal cattle but no one knows what they are, so they call them "ghosts". If you don't stop them, they abduct Romani, and when she returns she's not the same.
 * Freshly-Picked: Tingle's Rosy Rupeeland, which might be referring to Majora's Mask. Either way, by the time Tingle arrives at Lon Lon Meadow, aliens have already abducted the cows and brought them back. The cows now all sport purple alien heads.
 * The player can actually do this in the original Destroy All Humans!! Careful with the hatch there. "MOOOO" CLUNK. Hilarity.
 * In relation to the intro text, the aliens mistake the cows for the dominant earth life form. Which kind of makes sense. They stand around all day, get fed and milked by the two legs...
 * In the first X-COM game, UFO: Enemy Unknown, some of the UFOs had medical bays containing mutilated cattle corpses.
 * One mini-game in a Spyro the Dragon game that involves stopping aliens from kidnapping cattle.
 * Later subverted in a stage where you have to defend a robot city from alien sheep in UFOs.
 * The Earthworm Jim 2 level "Udderly Abducted".
 * In the Vehicle Combat game Critical Depth, the C.I.A. provide an alien race with fresh bovine placentas in return for their staying under wraps.
 * Appeared as a brief sight gag in a light-hearted Final Fantasy VIII side-quest. Among other things, such as Moai heads.
 * The bonus stages in Super Space Invaders 91 are precisely this (shoot flying saucers to stop them stealing cows, or shoot the saucer but not the cow before they fly off the screen with it, bonus for number of cows saved). They still called it Cattle Mutilation, though.
 * In Toy Commander one level sees you defending the cows from alien saucers. They're all models however as it's nothing but a child playing with his toys.
 * Universe At War has cattle as a valuable resource for the Hierarchy faction, because collecting organic resource is immediate, and cattle is worth 500 each. This fact is actually pointed out in the campaign, where the advisor told you that they're highly valuable.
 * This pops up as a Sidequest in Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles: Ring of Fates' multiplayer mode.
 * It's also in Crystal Bearers' with a sheep variant as well as cows.
 * One of the many things you can do during the space stage in Spore.
 * Also, prior to the space stage, you may see this happen - from the cow's perspective!
 * The premise of upcoming game Flock: You are an alien. You steal sheep.
 * The SPARROWS unit in Metal Slug 3 apparently caught on to the Mars People returning to Earth when they received numerous reports on cattle abductions.
 * One of the Frontier missions in Scribblenauts has an alien in a UFO stealing cattle, you're job is to stop him from doing it.
 * On that note, in Super Scribblenauts, both aliens and martians will attack cows.
 * Area 51. Bonus content reveals cattle mutilations are because of aliens with mental illnesses. Little green men need Prozac too.
 * Sam and Max joke about this in Sam and Max Freelance Police "Chariot of the Dogs": "(The chair in the UFO is) made from the leather of the finest mutilated cattle". This comment makes  very uncomfortable.
 * After playing a few gigs in the farm venue in Lego Rock Band, there is a cutscene where your bassist is abducted by a flying saucer. As the UFO starts flying away, it doubles back to beam up a cow, if only to reference this trope.
 * In the Fallout 3 expansion Mothership Zeta, you can collect various audio tracks of the aliens forcing abducted earthlings to speak, which most of them give their name and some info as to what time period they were taken from. One of these tapes features a cow mooing. Elsewhere on the ship, the player can find a button which beams a Brahmin (that's one of the two-headed mutated cows found around the wasteland) into a room to be immediately vaporized by an upgraded alien weapon.
 * In one section of the ship you end up in a trash elevator with Sally (the abductee who's been serving as your guide through the ship). The elevator keeps stopping at and opening up the hatch at different floors. Most of the floors feature aliens who'll shoot at you, but one floor has a herd of Brahmin (the aforementioned 2-headed cows), causing Sally to shout "Cows, we've got cows!".
 * The iPhone game Tower Madness has the aliens trying to abduct sheep from your farm instead of cows.
 * The Android game Abducted! has, as the main character, a cow whose herd has been abducted. She attempts to rescue them by jumping up to the UFO.
 * Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty has Otacon briefly referring to this trope when interpreting (badly) a certain Chinese Proverb for Solid Snake, much to his (understandable) confusion.
 * Metal Gear Solid Peace Walker also refers to this trope, this time with the implication that the CIA was responsible for the cattle mutilations.
 * For Christmas, the Gaia Online event plots had one event where aliens abducted cows.
 * Lampshaded when one alien announces, "I love doing this!"

Web Comics

 * Parodied in the web comic General Protection Fault, in which the aliens reveal that they really love cheese - but have no idea how to make it.
 * Irregular Webcomic has a cattle mutilation happens because one of the Martians misinterpret the order to survey Earth's military force.
 * Cattle mutilation is one of the myths about aliens that Princess Voltuptua vehemently denies in The Inexplicable Adventures of Bob.
 * Sam in Freefall has stated that he doesn't steal cattle because they bite him. He also thinks that they (and all earth animals for that matter) are the reason that aliens never made contact with earth, of course his species is apparently quite tasty.
 * A case of Truth in Television. Most people who have never been around cattle presume them to be docile and harmless creatures. In reality, cattle are often very skittish and sometimes very aggressive. They also weigh close to or upwards of a ton. They also kill more people per year than sharks do.
 * The Neptarians in Casey and Andy like nothing better than "some good old-fashioned cow-burning and inbred-yokel abduction". There's also their fantasy-universe counterparts the Zarb, whose king "enjoys cows in an impure way".
 * In the Insecticomics, when Kickback claimed to be a cowboy to avoid getting a job, Shrapnel and Bombshell called his bluff and brought him a herd of cows so he could work (and to serve him right). The cows were, presumably, stolen. And the Insecticons are alien robots, so...
 * Martian cyborgs in Sequential Art. Gary was sent to harvest cow lips while his fellow Eldaks a dangerous human.
 * Quentyn Quinn, Space Ranger had The Greys in a court for this as one of homage to classics single-panel gags.

Web Original

 * There was a 3D flash game on miniclip.com from some years ago, in which the player controls an alien flying saucer, and the objective is to beam up different things, with different points alotted based on what's been beamed up. The player can beam up cars, human beings and yes, cattle.
 * Parodied here.
 * In an early episode of RWBY Chibi, Nora turns Jaune's excruciatingly boring board game about compost into one about rescuing cows from alien abductors. With compost.

Western Animation
"Alien 1: Oh, that was Carl. He's new. Alien 2: Yeah, my bad."
 * Parodied on South Park; the aliens actually consider cows to be the most intelligent species on the planet (it helps they communicate in "moo"s). When one cow asks about the abductions and mutilations:


 * If you have seen more then one or two episodes, it becomes clear that aside from Stan, Kyle and maybe Kenny, the cows ARE probably the most intelligent species on the planet. And that includes the Crab People, talking turds, and whatever the hell Towlie is.
 * However, in the original version of that episode, the aliens mutilate the cows because.
 * Happens in one episode of Teen Titans. The aliens steal the cows because their milk serves as fuel. According to Starfire, there's also a planet of cow people.
 * Invader Zim had an episode that started out like this. Zim was infecting the cows with E. coli, in order to give humans all diarrhea.
 * Lampshaded in an episode of Ben 10: Alien Force by the Upgrade-type alien. "No wonder most aliens choose to communicate with your livestock."
 * In one Underdog story, Overcat steals all of Earth's cattle, and then abducts Sweet Polly Purebred to be the milkmaid.
 * The Veggie Tales video "Larry-Boy and the Fib from Outer Space" twice references a movie called Invasion of the Cow Snatchers, in which aliens abduct cows, switch brains with them, and then return them to the pastures in order to infiltrate Earth's society.

Other

 * Appears in street art from Oakoak here.
 * Or less subtly done, here.