Matt Moneymaker: During fall and winter, Bigfoots kill deer for their liver?

Back in 1995, while investigating cases of Bigfoots attacking deer near Guernsey County, Ohio, Matt Moneymaker discovered something very strange about the attacks. Matt had not noticed it before, but his wife, who happened to be an M.D. and the daughter of two veterinarians noticed something curious as she closely probed the open belly of a dead deer carcass. She noticed that the liver was gone.

"The liver is a rather large, dark reddish-brown organ sandwiched between the rib cage and the intestines. Carnivores don't typically go for the liver first, or at least the liver only, and it did not appear that a human was responsible; the wound that opened up the belly was not a clean cut, as with a sharp knife. In fact, the wound looked similar to those on the other deer carcasses I'd seen in Stark County, as if it had been cut open with something dull," wrote Matt.

"The impression my wife got was that the predator merely wanted to open the belly, move the intestines out of the way, lift up the rib cage, and remove the liver in its entirety. We looked around and found another carcass on top of a large rock outcropping, which the farmer had described, then another at the base. We checked both, and both of the livers were gone. It was truly a spooky sight."

Matt investigated further and came to this conclusion of why Bigfoots would go after the liver during the fall and winter season:

Why the liver?

Some people have expressed doubts that a predator would go to the trouble of hunting down a deer just to get at the liver, ignoring the rest of the flesh. It's difficult to quantify how much energy it takes to hunt a deer. A lot depends on the style of hunting. An intelligent strategy could minimize the chase and the overall effort. Logically, it would be easier to chase or trap a younger deer, especially if two predators were hunting cooperatively. It would also be much easier to carry a smaller deer back to a particular location, perhaps some distance away from the kill site. Nor would it be a waste time to focus on the liver exclusively. You won't find much else in the natural flora and fauna of North America that's a more profitable score than a deer's liver. Of all the parts of any large animal -- the muscles, the intestines, etc. -- the liver provides far and away the best pay off. It's no small catch. The liver is one of the largest organs in the gut. Even a juvenile deer's liver, if rolled into a ball, would take up nearly as much space as a bowling ball. In terms of nutrients, particularly in the fall and winter, an exclusive diet of deer liver could easily sustain something like a bigfoot until spring. The only thing that would provide a better exclusive and natural diet to get through the snowy season would be the liver of a larger ungulate, like a moose, elk or a bison, but only because there's more of it to eat.

Here's what a deer's liver provides:

1. Fresh raw deer liver contains substantial amounts of every vitamin necessary for life, particularly those which would become naturally depleted during the fall and winter.
2. Deer liver contains very substantial amounts of vitamin A, which is crucial for a nocturnal animal's ability to see in dark,
3. and it is equally crucial for the thickening of skin as in callous formation (through a process called keratinization). There's so much vitamin A in a deer's liver, in fact, that if a bigfoot were to live on an exclusive diet of deer liver all year round for many years it could eventually suffer from vitamin A poisoning, but that wouldn't happen over the course of the fall and winter seasons.
4. About 90% of all cholesterol produced in an animal is produced in the liver. Cholesterol is the building block for hormones.
5. Of all the organs, the liver dumps the highest amount of proteins into the blood. When this great repository of protein is eaten and digested the proteins get broken down into amino acids, which are then used as the raw materials to build new proteins and enzymes.
6. The liver is also primary repository for glycogen. Glycogen molecules are basically ready to use energy storage molecules formed by giant clusters of glucose molecules. In the digestion process these glycogen molecules get broken down and absorbed as glucose which can be used by the muscles and other tissues, such as brain cells, or can be rebuilt into ready to use energy storage molecules in the predator's own liver.
7. The liver stores tremendous amounts of lipids, another excellent calorie source.
8. On top of all this nutritional value, a liver is relatively easy to remove from a carcass. It's soft, and easily eaten (masticated) and digested. It would be a natural choice, perhaps even the exclusive choice, for a large primate -- an animal not equipped with the sharp teeth of a carnivore.

In terms of the work/gain equation, a bigfoot's habit of going after deer livers, and possibly leg bone marrow as well, and ignoring the raw muscles attached to the bone, would be the most efficient use of its energy in fall and winter.

It would seem logical that the overpopulation of deer in Ohio in the early 1990's, may be a factor that contributed to the number of deer kill stashes found in Ohio during that same period.

If bigfoots exist, and if they do prey upon large ungulates like deer or elk, then the lifestyles and dependencies of bigfoots will be slightly more predictable, and they will be slightly easier to locate in the future, in other areas.

Matt published this finding almost 17 years ago and his view on this may have changed overtime. Remember the Finding Bigfoot episode where someone found a deer bone fracture in the forest and Matt claimed that it was probably from a sasquatch kill? Many thought he was B.S.-ing. But his years of experience while investigating deer kills in Ohio probably led him to that conclusion. It's now easy to see why Matt would suggest that it was a 'squatch that may broken the bone.

[via: www.bfro.net]