North Hollow Hereford
Is Shot and Mutilated

One of North Hollow Farm’s breeding Hereford cows was shot dead and then repeatedly sliced and jabbed with a knife on Sunday, apparently by someone who drove onto the field where the cow was pastured.

Mike Bowen, who has run the high-elevation beef farm on Rochester’s North Hollow Road for the past 25 years, said this week that he found the animal Monday morning.

The shooting probably occurred the prior evening, he said.

Bowen said it appeared that someone drove onto the field, driving through the poly-rod and electric wire fencing enclosing the area and one of his herds.

The cow, standing about 25 feet from the fencing, was apparently felled with a single bullet, he said. The perpetrator then attempted to do some on-the-scene butchery, but ended by "just randomly cutting" the animal, Bowen added.

Whoever it was did succeed in hacking off a small piece of tenderloin, Bowen added.

"It’s just disturbing that someone would do that," he said of the incident.

The small meadow is a half-mile or less from his home, Bowen said, but he never heard the shot or any commotion. He suspects that a well-placed shot from a small-caliber—and relatively quiet—gun felled the 1200-pound cow.

The cow, which had recently been bred, was probably worth $1000, he said. She was a good mother—"one of the better cows"—and she was still nursing an older calf. That calf, though "blatting her head off now," Bowen said, is old enough to be weaned.

State police are investigating the shooting, and anyone with information is urged to contact the Royalton barracks at 234-9933.