Basic Trope: Aliens abduct cattle or other livestock, instead of human beings.
- Straight: A group of aliens visit a cattle ranch or a dairy farmnote and suck up 2 or 3 cows with their Flying Saucer's Tractor Beam.
- Exaggerated:
- All the cows are taken, not just a few of them. Oh, and they're abducted from inside the barn, not from an open field.
- The aliens hunt down and steal every single cow on Earth.
- Downplayed: Aliens abduct a few specimens of livestock for studying purpose once. They indirectly compensate the primitive farmers by using advanced fertilizer on their fields to ensure they will have a bumper-crop.
- Justified:
- The aliens are, perhaps due to some treaty or laws or what have you, not allowed to abduct other sapient beings such as humans for the purpose of experimenting or eating them, but non-sapient animals (including cows) are fair game.
- The aliens are rather cowlike in appearence, so of course they're going to abduct the earth lifeform which looks like them, just as The Greys are similar to us.
- The aliens love having some good steaks and milk, and they have no equivalent to cows on their homeworld.
- Cows make ideal hosts for the aliens' larvae and their mating season was just a few days ago.
- The aliens are just researchers and xenobiologists trying to learn about Earth's wildlife, and didn't even plan to do anything to the humans.
- The aliens are sending a warning to humanity to take better care of the earth or they will take away what destroys the environment, starting with livestock (who are indeed a major pollutant).
- Inverted:
- Aliens abduct humans.
- Cows abduct aliens.
- Humans abduct aliens' own cattle.
- Farmers are utterly befuddled yet rather grateful at the constant occurrence of UFOs that keep dropping off cattle to them.
- Subverted:
- The farmer comes out to milk the cows, and sees the UFO.
- The aliens seemingly point their tractor beam in the direction of a cow, but they only end up stealing the grass that the cow was grazing on out of the ground.
- Double Subverted:
- The aliens quickly shut off their tractor beams and go into stealth mode until the farmer leaves, then take the cows when he does.
- After stealing the grass out of the ground, the aliens promptly steal the cow anyway.
- Parodied:
- The cows have their own equivalent of MUFON.
- Shortly afterwards, the cow that was taken gets her Face on a Milk Carton.
- The aliens mistakenly think that cows are Earth's dominant species; their demands to meet the cow's leaders are met with nothing but moos.
- The aliens come to steal cows, do nothing with them, and absolutely nothing else.
- Zig Zagged: Sometimes the aliens take cows, sometimes other animals, and sometimes humans.
- Averted:
- Absent Aliens
- Alien Non-Interference Clause
- Aliens buy the cattle using a disguised agent paying with some of their lesser-used noble metals instead of abducting them. While the farmer thinks it is seriously weird, he isn't going to turn down a stranger's ridiculously overpaid offer of twenty five pounds of pure gold for a herd of cattle.
- Enforced: ???
- Lampshaded: "Those dang Little Green Men keep taking my cattle! I'm losing money!"
- Invoked: The aliens are curious about these strange animals the humans keep around.
- Exploited: A ufologist wants to lure the aliens, so he persuades the farmer to leave a cow out as bait.
- Defied: The aliens decide they don't want trouble from the humans, or that they don't have time for the Anal Probing of cattle, so they just continue on their way.
- Discussed: "Where'd all my cows go? Come to think of it, aliens were sighted recently, were they stolen?"
- Conversed: "Why do the aliens always steal cows?"
- They Plotted A Perfectly Good Waste: The UFOs abducting cattle while suspiciously leaving humans alone is Foreshadowing the aliens are very taurine in appearence, much as how the humanoid Greys usually abduct us.
- Implied: Local news reports of U.F.O. sightings become more frequent, and at the same time, farmers notice their cows dropping in number gradually.
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