The Cutprice Guignol

On 11th March, 1995, in the Puerto Rican town of Orocovis, a farmer awoke to a shocking sight: eight of his sheep had been killed overnight, their bodies drained of blood, several neat puncture wounds in each of their chests. The bizarre killings, though dismissed as nothing more than an oddity at the time, would soon become infamous, as the first of a series of attacks by a create known as the Chupacabra.

A few months later, in August 1995, the attacks exploded; more than 150 livestock animals and pets were reportedly found dead in similar circumstances in the Canóvanas area of Puerto Rico. From turkeys and rabbits to cows and horses, dozens of animals were found allegedly drained of blood through small puncture wounds; goats bore the brunt of the attacker’s aggression, earning it the moniker of Chupacabra (literally, Goat-Sucker) from Puerto Rican comedian Silverio Pérez. In the following months of 1995, thirty-five additional attacks were reported, along with a three-toed footprint left near the cage of the unfortunate exsanguinated rabbits. One evening, around thirty citizens of the region claimed to have spotted the creature, alleging that it swooped down from the sky and jumped across nearby treetops. At last, in November, eyewitness in Canóvanas named Madelyne Tolentino came forward to provide a description of the creature causing havoc in the region.

This adaptation of Tolentino’s description is the image that would become irrevocably tied to the chupacabra: a bipedal creature standing at about four foot tall with long claws and spinal quills running down it’s back, with huge red eyes that sometimes flashed grey and formidable claws. The blood-sucking was apparently due to a small tube that extended from the mouth and remained hidden the rest of the time, and it exuded a foul, sulphur-like scent.

In the year following, the chupacabra would continue to expand its hunting territory. People from Ciudad Juarez in Mexico to Miami, Florida reported attacks that seemed to mirror those that had been happening in Puero Rico – animals, from pets to livestock, killed and drained of blood with small, neat puncture wounds on their corpses. Interestingly, the creature when it appeared in central America seemed to differ from the description given by Tolentino and others in Latin America, featuring more of a canine presentation and moving on all fours.

Back in Canóvanas, mayor José Ramón Soto Rivera (better known as Chemo Soto) decided to take the fight to the chupacabra itself. Around the time of his re-election in late 1996, he began leading weekly expeditions into the dense vegetation surrounding Canóvanas to seek out the creature which had, by this stage, been blamed for the killings of several hundred local livestock and other animals. Using a caged goat for bait, Soto attempted to lure the creature out of hiding before it could turn its attention to the townsfolk: “Whatever it is, it’s highly intelligent. Today, it is attacking animals – tomorrow, it may be attacking people,” he warned in an interview quoted by the San Juan Star. Soto was successfully re-elected as mayor of Canóvanas in November, 1996.

But his hunt for the chupacabra – and any other attempts to catch the beast – remained unfruitful. It continued its apparent attacks for around five years, at least in terms of popular reporting – at the turn of the millennium, aside from few websites chronicling unsubstantiated sightings of the creature in the following years, stories of the creature’s escapades were starting to slow down. In early 2001, a shepard in Nicaragua delivered the body of what he claimed to be a chupacabra to a local university, where it was swiftly determined to be a dead dog. But it had earned international recognition as a one of the few recognizable modern cryptids and threat to goats everywhere.

But, for one skeptic, this wasn’t enough. Benjamin Radford, a writer and investigator of apparently inexplicable phenomena, began a five-year investigation into the veracity of the chupacabra – and just what it might have been beneath the legends surrounding it. Crucially, he interviewed Tolentino about her sighting of the chupacabra in 1995, and discovered that there might have been a far more straightforward explanation for the bizarre appearance of this goat-sucking cryptid than previously imagined.

In July, 1995, sci-fi horror film Species was released in Puerto Rico. Natasha Hendridge starred as Sil, a murderous alien who happened to hide her true, hideous form behind the veil of an attractive young woman. But her true form, Radford noted, was strikingly similar to that described by Tolentino in her sighting of the chupacabra. Tolentino had seen the movie when it came out less than a month before her reported sighting, and remarked herself on the striking similarity between the chupacabra and the creature that served as the antagonist for Species:

With Tolentino’s description of the creature serving as the basis for almost all of the depictions of it in popular culture, Radford concluded that the chupacabra’s origin had “finally been revealed” as based on Sil. Recent local folklore in the country regarding blood-sucking, livestock-killing creatures (known as the Vampire of Boca) could have been elided with Sil’s physical appearance to explain the chupacabra’s apparent murderous rampage.

But exactly what – or who – was killing those animals, if not the mysterious goat-sucker? There’s been a lot of debate about what exactly caused these widespread animal deaths during this period, and I think the most compelling explanation was put forward by University of Michigan biologist Barry O’Connor: that the creatures attacking these animals were actually coyotes and other wild dogs infected by sarcoptes scabiei, or scabies.

While relatively harmless in humans, O’Connor theorised that the parasite made the jump from people to domestic dogs and then on to local wildlife. When the mite burrows underneath the skin of the host, it can trigger an inflammatory response from the immune system, triggering mange in canines. In coyotes, this can lead to thickening of the skin, shedding of the fur, grey patches on the body, and a shrivelled or dessicated appearance (which can lead to their eyes seeming larger), as well as a strong, foul odour. Due to their weakened state, those affected are more likely to pick off livestock or house pets as prey instead of the more exhaustive hunt of a wild animal, with their weakness or inexperience leading to them not removing or fully consuming their prey.

The puncture wounds described could be a match for canine teeth, and, while reports described the victims as being drained of blood, without a full post-mortem, it’s very hard to verify that. Since most of the attacks took place overnight and the animals were left undisturbed after death, there’s a good chance that the blood settled on one side of the body, leading to the appearance of exsanguination. In some parts of Latin America, an all-time-worst drought could have driven wild dogs to seek out prey they might normally have sought out of desperation.

But if there is a mundane explanation for the chupacabra – what exactly did this livestock-slaughtering terror represent? Robin Derby, in her book Vampires of Empires, suggested that socioecomonic anxiety might be the cause, arguing that the chupacabra is a manifestation of fears of exploitation of Latin American communities by the USA in the form of cheap labour and abuse of resources, a literal blood-sucker destroying Latin American livestock.

Anna E Strachan, however, posited that the chupacabra was more likely a representation of fear of experimentation and dangers posed by modern science; she claimed that several Puerto Rican locals to the initial sightings believed that the create was a result of experimentation gone wrong – or even intentionally released into the area to cause havoc. With Puerto Rico’s history of victimization by scientific communities, such as the abuse of Puerto Ricans via the injection of cancer cells to track their progress in the 1930s to the impact of eugenics policies in the 1950s, it’s not hard to see why locals would view this latest problem as an extension of those previous abuses. Just over a decade before the chupacabra was first reported, legislation put through congress ordered the slaughter of pigs in Puerto Rico to prevent the spread of diseases to the mainland, directly tying this theory to the destruction of livestock.

Whatever your opinion on the chupacabra – whether you believe it’s a genuinely undiscovered creature that stalked Latin America over the course of the late 1990s, or if you think there’s a more mundane explanation – it has secured it’s place as part of cryptid history. What do you think of the chupacabra? Have you encountered it yourself? Let me know in the comments!

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