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'Chupacabras' Again?

http://www.khou.com/topstories/stories/ ... 0f7fc.html

Chupacabra caught in South Texas?

02:17 PM CDT on Tuesday, July 31, 2007

From KENS - TV

A rancher from the South Texas town of Cuero is telling a chupacabra tale and she say she has the evidence in her freezer.

Is it a chupacabra or a grey fox? Phylis Canion says the animal had been lurking around her ranch for years.

She said it first snatched cats, then chickens right through a wire cage. “(It) opened it reached in pulled the chicken head out, sucked all the blood out, left the chicken in the cage.”

Canion says two dozen chickens were sucked dry.

The meat, she says, was left on the bone.

Neighbors speculate the blue-colored animal that was doing all that damage was a chupacabra.

The name is translated from Spanish and means goat-sucker because the creature sucks the blood of livestock.


KENS - TV


Canion says not one, but three chupacabras were spotted outside the town in recent days.

All of them, she says, were blue-skinned, had no hair and had strange teeth.

Although Canion and her neighbors feel she captured a chupacabra, others like State Mammalogist John Young says she captured a grey fox. “When mange goes untreated it causes this type of reaction. they start to itch, lose all their hair, blue grey coloration. and the animal usually dies from it.”

But it wasn’t mange, but a car that killed the creature that Canion captured. “There have been so many stories for so long. The chupacabra is a mythical thing and maybe it is, but this is something…a cross between something. What? I don’t know, I’d love to find out.”

So, KENS-TV took samples of the creature and sent it off for DNA testing.

Those results are due.

Meanwhile, the creature’s head, which is in Canion’s freezer, will go on her home’s wall. “This one hands down will draw the most attention. Because they’re gonna say you got zebras, you got this, you got that, what is this thing here? That’s what we call the South Texas taz devil

Looks like more of the same here. Or is it a mongoose? Do DNA tests ever bear fruit?
 
Here's another story, with different pictures, about the Cuero "chupacabra."

http://apnews.myway.com//article/200709 ... KANO0.html

Still no DNA result announcement; I'll let you know. KENS is a San Antonio station, so I ought to hear something!

Cuero is east of here, about midway along and south of the line of Interstate Highway 10 between San Antonio and Houston. The area is flat and reasonably well-wooded, retaining its rural character but having easy access to large towns and cities. The Texas Rennaissance Faire is out in that direction. I gather from the big game hunting and the chickens that this woman is a well-off hobby rancher whose primary income is not from agriculture. You can buy the t-shirts referenced at cafepress.

Has a Mythical Beast Turned Up in Texas?

Sep 1, 6:54 AM (ET)

By ELIZABETH WHITE

(AP) Phylis Canion examines the head of what she is calling a Chupacabra at her home in Cuero, Texas,...
Full Image

CUERO, Texas (AP) - Phylis Canion lived in Africa for four years. She's been a hunter all her life and has the mounted heads of a zebra and other exotic animals in her house to prove it. But the roadkill she found last month outside her ranch was a new one even for her, worth putting in a freezer hidden from curious onlookers: Canion believes she may have the head of the mythical, bloodsucking chupacabra.

"It is one ugly creature," Canion said, holding the head of the mammal, which has big ears, large fanged teeth and grayish-blue, mostly hairless skin.

Canion and some of her neighbors discovered the 40-pound bodies of three of the animals over four days in July outside her ranch in Cuero, 80 miles southeast of San Antonio. Canion said she saved the head of the one she found so she can get to get to the bottom of its ancestry through DNA testing and then mount it for posterity.

She suspects, as have many rural denizens over the years, that a chupacabra may have killed as many as 26 of her chickens in the past couple of years.


(AP) Phylis Canion holds a photo of what she is calling a Chupacabra in Cuero, Texas, Friday, Aug. 31,...
Full Image


"I've seen a lot of nasty stuff. I've never seen anything like this," she said.

What tipped Canion to the possibility that this was no ugly coyote, but perhaps the vampire-like beast, is that the chickens weren't eaten or carried off - all the blood was drained from them, she said.

Chupacabra means "goat sucker" in Spanish, and it is said to have originated in Latin America, specifically Puerto Rico and Mexico.

Canion thinks recent heavy rains ran them right out of their dens.

"I think it could have wolf in it," Canion said. "It has to be a cross between two or three different things."


(AP) Phylis Canion holds the head of what she is calling a Chupacabra at her home in Cuero, Texas,...
Full Image


She said the finding has captured the imagination of locals, just like purported sightings of Bigfoot or the Loch Ness Monster have elsewhere.

But what folks are calling a chupacabra is probably just a strange breed of dog, said veterinarian Travis Schaar of the Main Street Animal Hospital in nearby Victoria.

"I'm not going to tell you that's not a chupacabra. I just think in my opinion a chupacabra is a dog," said Schaar, who has seen Canion's find.

The "chupacabras" could have all been part of a mutated litter of dogs, or they may be a new kind of mutt, he said.

As for the bloodsucking, Schaar said that this particular canine may simply have a preference for blood, letting its prey bleed out and licking it up.

Chupacabra or not, the discovery has spawned a local and international craze. Canion has started selling T-shirts that read: "2007, The Summer of the Chupacabra, Cuero, Texas," accompanied by a caricature of the creature. The $5 shirts have gone all over the world, including Japan, Australia and Brunei. Schaar also said he has one.

"If everyone has a fun time with it, we'll keep doing it," she said. "It's good for Cuero."

I have noticed that these doglike chupacabras tend to be found by white people. The original Puerto Rican chupacabras looked nothing like a dog.[/quote]
 
Sorry, that just looks like a very ugly cross-breed dog. And she looks like she's about to give a puppet show...
 
Looks like a big, ugly dog to me. And as PeniG noted, the original description of the chupacabras is nothing like the mange infested canines we've seen so many pictures of.
 
hedgewizard1 said:
Looks like a big, ugly dog to me. And as PeniG noted, the original description of the chupacabras is nothing like the mange infested canines we've seen so many pictures of.
What original description? There are dozens of descriptions. The big eyed spined one may be the most famous, but it's a relative late-comer.
 
I'm referring to the first newspaper accounts with which I was acquainted back in the early 90s, which were indeed vague and contradictory, but tended to include peculiar means of locomotion - either the rapid switching back and forth between bipedal and quadrupedal means, kangaroo-like soaring leaps, or flying.

There's an irony here, since the debunking government officials in those early reports invariably tried to blame the livestock deaths on wild dogs, the descriptions witnesses gave had no canine features; now the chupacabras name is being given to incontrovertible canids who are connected to livestock losses only by inference. No one has seen one of these unfortunate critters raiding a chicken coop.

But far be it from me to discourage t-shirt sales.
 
I won't have the print news story till tomorrow and somebody'll probably beat me to it, but I just watched the official envelope-opening revealing the results of the DNA test on the Cuero beast and - brace yourself - it's a coyote with a skin disease. The t-shirt lady opened the envelope and she said her first questions were why, if it was a coyote, it had no hair, no teeth between the canines, too-short ears, and front legs shorter than the back. The state DNA guy said it was an old coyote, as you could tell from the skull, and he couldn't state without testing which skin disease it had, but it did have one. MySA is supposed to have a link on its website which will allow you to compare the DNA data for yourself, come morning. High school biology classes are viewing this as an opportunity.

None of this proves anything about the "real" chupacabras or the chicken deaths, of course, and T-shirt Lady didn't look like she was going to give up her small business without a fight. I wonder whether t-shirt sales will fall off?
 
PeniG said:
I won't have the print news story till tomorrow and somebody'll probably beat me to it, but I just watched the official envelope-opening revealing the results of the DNA test on the Cuero beast and - brace yourself - it's a coyote with a skin disease.

Thank God they finally performed a DNA test! That's all most of us ever asked for in the first place, back when the so-called Elmendorf Beast was current news.

I was getting really, really, really tired of hearing Texas naturalists, among the finest in the world, pontificating over fuzzy newspaper photographs of animal remains as though this was somehow the very latest in viable and conclusive scientific tests.
 
The Beeb's even covering this one:

Tests end Texan goat-sucker stir

US scientists say an animal found in Texas is not the chupacabra - or goat-sucker - of American myth, but a coyote with a hair loss problem [...]

link
 
chupacabras

I've been telling people for years that the photos of the chupacabras in South Texas are dead-ringers for the (supposedly 80-year-extinct) Tasmanian Wolf. Look it up on the web. It's a marsupial, not a canid; thus the extra-long hind legs and the "kangaroo-like" head.
 
But the corpses have no pouches and the one on which DNA testing was run definitely was a coyote. Since the chupacabras that came into public view in Puerto Rico in the 90s had no canid features, it's never been clear to me why anyone ever stuck the truncated moniker onto the poor beasts.

A Tasmanian wolf in Texas would be mindbogglingly Fortean, so more power to you.

Somebody posted a news story about a police film from Cuero of a "chupacabra" running down the road to a newsgroup my husband frequents. Since it looked exactly like that unfortunate coyote to me, and the people interviewed as good as admitted that they were after civic publicity, I didn't bother to track it to its source to link here, but I can if anyone cares for me to do so.
 
PeniG said:
....the one on which DNA testing was run definitely was a coyote.

Peni, the way I read the DNA reports (assuming we're talking about the same ones, the results from the California laboratory) they documented a hybrid between a coyote and a Mexican hairless wolf.

That satisfied both those of us who'd assumed that the animal was indeed a "just plain" coyote and those of us who insisted that it had to be something more.

P. S. According to yesterday's local television news there's a coyote infestation just north of Cincinnati, Ohio, with the coyotes traveling in packs and feeding on pets.

The residents are highly upset that the authorities claim "there's nothing that can be done."

We'll see what happens the first time the coyotes maim or kill a child.

Sincerely,

George Wagner
 
First I've heard of any hybrid results. The news report I saw on the Cuero critter said "coyote," no qualifications.

As anyone from the west can tell you folks in Ohio, the amount you can do about coyotes is limited. You can only do so much shooting in a residential neighborhood, while poison and traps are more likely to kill pets. Coyotes are as smart and tough as rodents. Keep your pets in at night, teach your kids to respect wild animals, control your garbage, and don't make your yard a coyote habitat - no dog food left out. Those are your best defenses.

Oh, and it wouldn't hurt to have skunks under your house. Nobody messes with them!
 
I'm so glad you spell the word properly, with the S on the end. One chupacabras has an S, like Jennifer Lopez.
 
celticrose said:
I'm so glad you spell the word properly, with the S on the end. One chupacabras has an S, like Jennifer Lopez.

I think the problem stems from the fact that "chupacabras" is no longer just a Spanish word.

It is now an English word, too.

And English words do not necessarily play by the rules of Spanish grammar.

So in English it is "Chupacabra," singular, "Chupacabras," plural. (Personally, I still write the word in the Spanish manner, but historically I'm bound to be on the losing side.)

English steals from 42 other languages and does with them what it pleases. Hey, don't blame me! It started doing it centuries before I was born.
 
OldTimeRadio said:
celticrose said:
I'm so glad you spell the word properly, with the S on the end. One chupacabras has an S, like Jennifer Lopez.

I think the problem stems from the fact that "chupacabras" is no longer just a Spanish word.

It is now an English word, too.

And English words do not necessarily play by the rules of Spanish grammar.

So in English it is "Chupacabra," singular, "Chupacabras," plural. (Personally, I still write the word in the Spanish manner, but historically I'm bound to be on the losing side.)

English steals from 42 other languages and does with them what it pleases. Hey, don't blame me! It started doing it centuries before I was born.

I think the battle can still be won to keep the S at the end, if enough of us keep it in there. "Chupacabra" just sounds wrong to me. It grates on my nerves almost as much as hearing someone say "I could care less" when they mean they couldn't.

Any way, I don't think anyone posted a link to the latest mislabelled canid
yet, so here is one:
http://www.fox11az.com/video/index.html?nvid=271966
 
OldTimeRadio said:
PeniG said:
..Peni, the way I read the DNA reports (assuming we're talking about the same ones, the results from the California laboratory) they documented a hybrid between a coyote and a Mexican hairless wolf.

That's funny. I am Mexican and I have never heard about "hairless wolves". As far as a I know, Mexican wolves are hairy. :?
 
Onix_Martinez said:
OldTimeRadio said:
PeniG said:
..Peni, the way I read the DNA reports (assuming we're talking about the same ones, the results from the California laboratory) they documented a hybrid between a coyote and a Mexican hairless wolf.

That's funny. I am Mexican and I have never heard about "hairless wolves". As far as a I know, Mexican wolves are hairy. :?

I think Peni meant the Mexican hairless dog breed. The one that usually wins ugliest dog competitions:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mexican_Hairless_Dog
It could be a misquote from other sources, as Google finds "Mexican Hairless wolf" only in relation to this story.
 
Fats_Tuesday said:
Onix_Martinez said:
OldTimeRadio said:
PeniG said:
..Peni, the way I read the DNA reports (assuming we're talking about the same ones, the results from the California laboratory) they documented a hybrid between a coyote and a Mexican hairless wolf.

That's funny. I am Mexican and I have never heard about "hairless wolves". As far as a I know, Mexican wolves are hairy. :?

I think Peni meant the Mexican hairless dog breed. The one that usually wins ugliest dog competitions:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mexican_Hairless_Dog
It could be a misquote from other sources, as Google finds "Mexican Hairless wolf" only in relation to this story.

That's more like it. Actually, it could be any of the hairless races. There's Chinese, Peruvian, Mexican and maybe some more in the America. Essentially, it's the same type of dog, and sometimes they can be very expensive (and great for people with alergies or reumatism, because they shed no hair and are very warm, or something along those lines). Anyway, lovely animals, but they also tend to have bad teeth and ugly skin. So maybe, a few of those had a Texan love affair with a coyote or wolf and PRESTO! A bunch of hairless ugly puppies are born. That sounds plausible to me.
 
Chupacabra: blood-sucking mythical beast 'found in Texas'
Two men in Texas believe they may have discovered the body of a chupacabra – a mythical beast rumoured to suck all the blood out of its prey.
Published: 9:18AM BST 03 Sep 2009

Lynn Butler, a taxidermist, says that he found the mystery creature's corpse in a chicken barn three months ago, the morning after an unseen predator was heard running amock.

While its hairless, leathery body and pointed muzzle resemble a dog with severe mange, other animal experts who have inspected the corpse have suggested it may be a chupacabra, a predator first sighted in Puerto Rico in 1995.

Although descriptions of chupacabras differ wildly – they are variously compared to rodents, lizards and even small bears – they tend to be distinguished by prominent fangs visible on Mr Butler's specimen.

The name translates from the Spanish as "goat sucker" because of reports that the beasts puncture the skins of livestock with their teeth, draining them of blood.

Suspected sightings have been reported across the Americas and even as far away as Russia, but scientists dismiss the animals as modern legends.

Jerry Ayer, a friend of Mr Butler and a fellow taxidermist, now has possession of the body and says he plans to have it properly stuffed and mounted for public display.

"To be honest, I don't know what it is. I'd probably say it's a freak-of-nature coyote, or a hybrid breed with a genetic mutation," he told the Los Angeles Times .

"It has a little fuzz around the feet. Almost like little socks of fur. And there's a little hair up the backbone. Very odd-looking," he added. "The hairlessness is sinister because you can see the bones protruding at the hips.

"People say there's a mythical beast and I have one. I'll call it chupacabra because people love it, but I don't know what it is."

Mr Ayer says that he does not want to develop a reputation as a crank, but says he has pleased that widespread interest in the find – he has been interviewed by CNN and other US networks – has increased the profile of his business, Blanco Taxidermy School.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstop ... Texas.html

Looks like a mangy ol' dawg to me, but what do I know? :D
 
It's almost certainly another mangy coyote. But the man's got a business to run. You can't blame him, much, for making the most of its peculiarities.

This story ran on the same local station that paid for and announced the DNA test on the Cuero "chupacabra" and revealed it to be a coyote, but the coverage didn't mention this. That, I blame the station for.
 
Where's the 'S' in Jennifer Lopez?
Where's the goatsucker in Texas/Oklahoma? This is a dead dog. Maybe a cross between a coyote and some breed of hairless dog, maybe not. Personally I couldn't give a flying one.There has to be more to cryptozoology than the pedigree of dead dogs.

When the goatsucker reports started coming out of Puerto Rico it was a spiny, glaring-eyed, livestock slaughtering bulletproof m@@@@@f@@@@r of a beast , and now it's just a bald mutt scurrying round Texas.

Whatever happened to that original monster? It sounded like an experiment in breeding and reanimation of animal corpses, something like the Skinwalker Ranch wolf , which shed lumps of decaying flesh when shot and just walked off.
Mutt and monster have nothing in common, not even location. There wasn't even anything particularly canine about the original goatsucker. That creature was speculatively linked with a secret US animal research lab on PR, and Skinwalker Ranch seemed to have Black Projects Central buried underneath it.
Nothing has been heard of the early-model chupa for years, nor the bulletproof zombie wolf. Now, after a lapse of several years, we get this thing. There are weirder looking dog breeds on Crufts' dog show than that.

They seem to be dropping like flies, whatever they are : such a profusion of cryptid corpses is the only unusual thing about this pooch.

My point is, it needs a different name. the real goatsucker is different, and extinct.
 
Bigfoot73 said:
Where's the 'S' in Jennifer Lopez?
Just as importantly, what happened to the "S" in "El Chupacabras"? I always understood that the word was both singular and plural, so no need to drop any letters.
 
Even I could see this latest one's a Mexican Hairless dog, and I'm a cat person.

Thanks to Fats Tuesday's wiki link above http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mexican_Hairless_Dog, I now am anticipating the next conversation I can possibly squeeze the proper breed name into, and practicing saying it.... I think I might even want one just cos the name's so cool.

***Sholo-eats-quint-lee... Sholo-eats-quint-lee... Sholo-eats-quint-lee... ***
 
We had the fortune (or misfortune) to see the Cuero "chupacabra" - the poor hideous thing. :cry:
It wasn't readily identifiable as a coyote, or anything else, aside from being canine. The jaw looked very strange to me. If I recall correctly, they did three different DNA tests with three different results. The last seemed to indicate coyote mixed with something else.
I don't think it's farfetched to say that it's a cross-breed animal, with some sort of mutation that spread into the gene pool.
In North Texas, the woods are full of wolf/dog hybrids that are beautiful but very dangerous. Probably the same thing's happened here, but the results aren't so pretty to look at.
As far as blood-sucking goes, There's no more evidence than exsanguinated chickens + strange animal nearby = chupacabra. :lol:
 
Chupacabras

I still say its the Tasmanian Wolf. Look it up and compare an illustration with the several photos of dead "chupacabras" in south Texas. I've heard of experts claiming they're canids, but I still can't say Ive seen convincing, unequivocal evidece.
 
The DNA results of the Cuero critter came back "mangy coyote." I don't know what you want more than that.
 
by KENS 5 Staff

kens5.com

Posted on April 21, 2010 at 4:41 PM

Updated yesterday at 4:43 PM

If you think you have seen it all at Fiesta, then you must have stopped in at this unusual booth at Fiesta Fantasias held at Market Square.

On display was a mummified chupacabra. Stevens charges $1.00 for the public to get a closeup look at what he claims is the only known chupacabra in the U.S.

But no more.

Owner Brian Stevens says the special specimen has been stolen.

“I’ve owned the chupacabra for more than a year and my partner, David Walker had owned it for two years prior” said Stevens. “It’s one of three, and the other two are in Ensenada, Mexico where this one was purchased,” said Stevens.

Wednesday Stevens reported the theft to the San Antonio Police Department.

“We’ve contacted the owner of the other two chupacabras in Mexico and they are making arrangements to bring one on loan for the remainder of Fiesta,” said Stevens.

Stevens is offering a reward for the return of the remains.

Call SAPD if you have any information on the mysterious disappearance of this chupacabra.

Source: http://www.kens5.com/news/local/Fiesta- ... 57639.html
 
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