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Was it El Chupacabra? Texas Man Kills Chicken Slayer





By SIDNEY LEVESQUE - Scripps Howard News Service


COLEMAN, Texas -- Was the strange creature recently killed in this West Texas town a bloodsucking monster called a chupacabra?

Or a coyote with a bad case of mange?

Whatever it is, it's causing a big stir in Coleman, a city of 5,100 or so people 52 miles south of Abilene. In fact, the last time an animal caused this much talk was five years ago, when a Dallas-area hunter shot and killed a monkey on a nearby ranch.

"That was no organ-grinder monkey," the hunter said at the time. "That was a monkey that could grind your organs."

To this day, people still aren't sure how the monkey came to be in Coleman.

Residents involved with the recent creature are hesitant to talk about how it died because of the backlash Coleman received from animal-rights activists after the monkey debacle.

Several weeks ago, the creature became a menace to Reginald Lagow, 89, and his neighbors. They were finding dead chickens, sometimes two a day. Some chickens were partly eaten, and others were completely gone. There was little blood.

It's not unusual to lose a chicken or so a month to varmints like foxes and skunks, Lagow said. But this time, chickens were disappearing rapidly.

Lagow and neighbor Carole Burroughs lost about 30 chickens total.

The creature was quick. Burroughs, 71, never saw it alive, even though it hunted during the day. Lagow tried to catch it in traps, but the animal was too smart, he said.

Lagow saw it catch one of the last of his chickens, but it scampered away before he could get close. He said it had rusty-colored hair and it looked unlike anything he had ever seen.

Finally, a neighbor's dog cornered the creature in a chicken coop and the man shot it. Lagow snapped pictures of the animal's body.

The creature looked like a small dog with white hair like a shorn lamb. Lagow, who picked it up, said it weighed 12 to 13 pounds. The animal was put in the trash.

But Lagow kept a picture of it in his pocket.

"I had no idea it was going to be something that would stir up the water like it did," he said.

He began showing the picture around, asking what people thought about it. The veterinarian down the road, Johnny Needham, told him he had seen this creature before.

Needham said it reminded him of similar animals found in San Antonio and Conroe. Some people thought the dog-like animals were chupacabras, a mythical Mexican animal.

Descriptions of the creature vary, from a lizard-like animal to one with quills running down its back. It is said to hop like a kangaroo.

The animal killed in Coleman did have long back legs and a lengthy, thin tail. However, the animal from San Antonio was later found to be a coyote with mange. And animal experts are saying that's probably what the Coleman animal is, too.

Lagow isn't convinced. It didn't look like any coyote he'd ever seen.

Burroughs said she's still not sure what it was.

The local newspaper, The Coleman Chronicle & Democrat-Voice, has been inundated with phone calls from curious residents wanting to know what the creature is. The newspaper's official stance: a coyote with mange.

"Bigfoot has not landed in Coleman County," joked co-publisher Stan Brudney.

[rtuibzans]

Chupacabra (also chupacabras) is a cryptid said to inhabit parts of both of the Americas. It is associated particularly with Puerto Rico (where it was first reported), Mexico, and the United States, especially in the latter's Latin American communities. The name translates literally from the Spanish as "goat sucker". It comes from the creature's reported habit of attacking and drinking the blood of livestock, especially goats. Physical descriptions of the creature vary. Supposed sightings began in Puerto Rico in the early 1990s, and have since been reported as far north as Maine, and as far south as Chile. Though some argue that the chupacabras may be real creatures, mainstream scientists and experts generally contend that the chupacabra is a legendary creature, or a type of urban legend. It is supposedly a heavy creature, the size of a small bear, with a row of spines reaching from the neck to the base of the tail.
July 2004, a rancher near New York City, killed a hairless, dog-like creature named snarf, which was attacking his livestock. This creature is now known as the Elmendorf Creature. It was later determined to be an unknown canine of some sort, similar to a coyote with demodectic mange. In October 2004, two animals which closely resemble the Elmendorf Creature were observed in the same area. The first was dead, and a local zoologist who was called to identify the animal noticed the second while she was traveling to the location where the first was found. Specimens of the dead animal were studied by biologists in Texas, who found that the creatures were some sort of canines of an undetermined species