The Chupacabras from the 90’s sightings is much more intriguing to me than the dog/chupacabra stuff that has been surfacing lately.

Also, the creature was invariably linked in with possible extraterrestrials, but then again, aren’t most bipedal cryptids at some point?

It also shows just how complicated the development of folklore can be. Here we have mangy dogs becoming inextricably linked with Chupacabras, a seemingly completely different creature with folklore all its own. So you have a new mythology with the dogs emerging from another.

Of course cryptozoology deals heavily with the folkloric connections of alleged cryptids. It is of great importance to look at the cultural percaptions of certain phenomena and how that pertains to their world when examining ethnoknown cryptids. Often a folkloric animal can be based on something grounded in a real animal. In this case, however, we have a real animal being connected with an existing folklore after the fact, so I think it puts the folkloric investigations of cryptozoology in an interesting light.

It’s sort of like, which came first the chicken or the egg? Are animals linked after the folklore was entrenched or did the folkore build upon the animal first? I suspect it is a little of both.

In this case we have a real animal, a dog, being made into a chupacabras, yet we cannot ignore the existence of the Chupacabras before the mange ridden mutts started cropping up. Something else is behind that particular bit of folklore.

So my question is what kind of creature could have been responsible for the original Chupacabras that looked nothing like a dog? Certainly not coyotes.

Interesting topic.

For photos and more info see here.

But chupacabras was in the air, literally before that.

As I have mentioned here before, an earlier discovery of the use of “Chupacabras” can be seen as directly linked to the creature that usually is noted to kill goats and suck their blood.

In the previous case, the term “Chupacabras” was employed in 1960, in an episode of the famed TV western, “Bonanza.” The word “Chupacabras” was said by a Mexican character who was talking with one of the Cartwright family, about a creature that sucked the milk (not blood) from goats. On the show, it was thus linked to being one of the “goatsuckers,” and was related to the birds, the whippoorwills.

The Chupacabras had a pointed tongue, and it was hairy. Interesting, but they would find one or two puncture marks in the back of the neck, often that would enter the brain cavity. Also, there were often other circular puncture marks and either the blood would be drained, or organs, and in particular the liver would be gone, or “opened.” But the animals were often intact not counting the puncture wounds…pretty much ruling out the usual predators who tear flesh when they kill.

Also, they talked about how the Chupacabras was showing up on the fringes of large forested areas…and they suggested that these areas had recently been being moved into, deforesting and extending into these areas…so perhaps moving into something’s hunting grounds.

The end of the episode did make a statement about the fact that shortly thereafter, in Miami Florida, a couple of small animals and chickens had been found dead in the same manner. I think that is how Chupacabras vaulted to the United States…now whether it actually found its way to America or came over through stories and people traveling from Puerto Rico, who knows. However, these dogs that are being called Chupacabras are definitely not Chupacabras.

I first saw a thing on Chup (See, I’m evening shortening the name…adding to the mythology:) on a show called Unsolved Mysteries…and it took place down in Costa Rica…or maybe it was Puerto Rico (am going to go look at the tape again now).

But the thing described there was definitely occasionally bipedal–though I believe it crept around on all fours also, especially when sneaking up on prey…and a police officer encountered one while driving home and it ran across in front of him on two legs, and had larger than normal eyes, clawed hands and some sort of spines or protrusions coming off its back. Also, when it killed animals, it was usually only a puncture mark to the back of the head or abdominal cavity.

Again, I think once news of Chupacabras got hot in the media, suddenly the stories moved north and into the U.S.

It’s curious. Does anyone have anything else on the original “Chup?”

Like Spring-heeled Jack says, the original chupacabra was completely different. To me the original chupa seemed like a selective breeding/cybernetics/re-animation of animal corpses thing. Remember the Skinwalker Ranch wolf,which had pieces of rotting flesh shot off it while otherwise not reacting to the bullets?

Original chupa is high Strangeness, this is just a dog.

The close-ups of this animal does not show the typical lesions I would expect from a case of mange that causes hair loss across the entire body. I would expect such an animal to have extremely inflamed, crusted skin with evidence of secondary bacterial or yeast infections. This animal’s skin is smooth over large portions of the body (there a few places that look rough or crusted). A skin scrape on a living or freshly killed specimen would probably find mites, if present. (Normally Sarcoptes mites can be difficult to find on skin scrapes, but I would expect to easily find them if the animal’s entire body was affected). I think this dog resembles the hairless raccoon that was featured a while back more than a mangy dog (i.e., a dog with a similar hair loss condition to the raccoon.)

I think these animals could just as likely be a new breed of dog produced by nature. Genetic drift and the bottleneck effect can easily explain the emergence of a new breed without even needing to be a new species. Man has selected for some really weird-looking dogs over a relatively short period of time. If these animals are coyote-dog hybrids, then the same effect could have occurred.

I propose the name, “Chupacabras Dog” for this new breed, in the same vein as “elephant seal” or “rhinoceros beetle.”