WHAS11 News is investigating the suspected outbreak of a deadly cattle virus. 

Blue tongue disease has apparently jumped from Kentuckiana’s deer population to area livestock and a southern Indiana farm has been hit hard.

Everything appeared normal on Kenny Yeager’s farm on Saturday, until he went outside.  First he found one cow down, then two, and as of this morning, a total of twelve dead cattle.

“It’s just devastating.  It’s taken years to build them up, and over a twenty four hour period I lost all of them,” Yeager told WHAS11 News. 

That loss has settled on Yeager’s face, along with even more concern over whether or not his remaining twenty cattle will survive.  He fears that they too will suffer what Yeager says was a bizarre and painful death.

“Something in them just makes them go crazy.  They’ll just take off.  All my cows are tame and they’ll just run from one end of the field to the other and then just lay down and act like they’re fighting for their life, and when they do, it’s over.”

Yeager has spent twenty-five years of his life building up this herd and he says that this weekend’s shock is just adding insult to injury after already struggling to stay in business.

“It’s a pretty hard blow.  We’ve had a drought all year.  We lost the wheat crop in spring, and then didn’t have a hay crop and now I’ve lost all my cattle.  It’s just going to be hard making it through the year, making ends meet.”

The Yeagers say that from everything their vet saw he believes their herd has been infected with blue tongue disease.  He’ll be conducting some of his own testing while he’s asked the Yeagers to take one of their dead cattle to Purdue University to find out for sure.

Web story produced by Joann Dickson