It was a heist straight out of an episode of Beavis and Butthead. On January 24, nearly $50,000 worth of frozen bull semen was jacked off a truck in Turlock, California.
The load of bull semen was scheduled to be dropped off the next day, but when Turlock resident Anthony Reis arrived at his first dairy for his regularly scheduled delivery, he found his work truck’s rear end was no longer filled with sperm.
“The loss of all those units of semen, and probably taken by someone who had no idea what they were stealing, is very frustrating,” he said in an interview with CBS Sacramento. (He cited the crooks’ theft of fuel from the truck’s gas tank as evidence that they weren’t particularly discriminating.)
The stolen semen came from some of the most valuable bulls in the country, with one of the animals ranked as the fifth-best on earth.
“The genetics that these bulls have in them is out of the top 1 percent of the world population,” farm owner John Azevedo told CBS. “Over 70 to 75 percent of all cattle in the U.S. is inseminated artificially, improving their genetics in order to improve production.”
Sadly, the future doesn’t look good for this testicular batter. The tanks have to be kept at -320 degrees Fahrenheit or the semen spoils; once the supercool liquid nitrogen evaporates, it’s last song for the little swimmers. And should the thieves accidentally touch the liquid nitrogen themselves, they could be staring down the barrel of a Terminator 2-like world of hurt.
