ELLSWORTH – Two masked protesters disrupted an informational meeting Saturday at City Hall and attacked two state agriculture officials with cow manure. No one was seriously injured, and the pair of assailants escaped.

State veterinarian Dr. Don Hoenig and Shelley Doak, director of animal industry for the Maine Department of Agriculture, were winding up a meeting with local farmers when the attack occurred.

The two protesters entered the upstairs auditorium at City Hall dressed in black, wearing caricature masks and carrying “manure pies,” a mixture of manure and wood shavings in aluminum pie tins.

They threw the manure at the two officials with enough force that the spray also struck several of the attendees, including a reporter for a weekly paper, and spattered against walls.

The two left the auditorium and escaped through the front door of City Hall, pursued by at least one of the meeting organizers. They fled through the City Hall parking lot toward Main Street and then disappeared.

The meeting had been arranged to discuss proposed legislation that would authorize the state’s agriculture department to develop rules for a livestock identification and tracking program.

Although the discussion had been sometimes heated during the session, it had been, for the most part, civil, until then.

Meeting organizers were upset with the attack and feared that it might undo the good the conversation had achieved. Organizer Lore Lipvich of Mariaville said she was appalled by the action.

“We’re trying to work this through so everybody benefits,” Lipvich said. “This is not the message we were trying to send.”

The attack ended the meeting, but Doak and Hoenig remained for a while cleaning themselves off with paper towels and continued to discuss the identification issue with farmers.

Hoenig said he would insist on a police presence for future meetings on this issue.

Police searched the area but were not able to find the attackers. While some witnesses thought the manure came from a horse, the police report referred to the substance as cow manure.

The case remains under investigation.