Is the chupacabra real? What the 'goat sucker' turned out to be

What the chupacabra is

The chupacabra is a young legend: an animal said to kill livestock and drink their blood. Benjamin Radford, who spent five years investigating the creature for his book Tracking the Chupacabra, dates the first stories to March 1995 in Puerto Rico, when dead goats said to be drained of blood began turning up. A 2010 University of Michigan release describes the same starting point with dead sheep found with puncture wounds.

There are really two chupacabras, and they look nothing alike. The Puerto Rican original walks on two legs. In August 1995 a newspaper printed an eyewitness description of a creature 4 to 5 feet tall, with spikes down its back, long thin limbs and an oblong, alien-like head with red or black eyes. The animal behind most chupacabra sightings in the United States since 2004 is something else entirely: four-legged, dog-like, nearly hairless, with grey, scaly-looking skin.

The popular claim: a vampire on the farm

The claim is that an unknown predator gets onto farms at night, kills goats, sheep and chickens, and drinks their blood through small puncture wounds. After the Puerto Rico reports, accounts of similar creatures spread through the Caribbean, Latin America, Mexico and Florida; in Radford's account it was one of the first monsters of the internet age. UFO enthusiasts soon proposed that it was an alien or an alien's pet, and another version, which Radford's book examines, held that it had escaped from secret US government experiments in Puerto Rico.

The reports had faded by 2000 and returned in 2004, when something began attacking livestock in Texas and a farmer shot one of the animals. More carcasses followed. By the mid-2000s, Radford said in a 2011 Live Science report, the label was being applied to almost anything odd: mangy coyotes, dead raccoons, even a dried fish in New Mexico. For anyone asking whether the chupacabra is real, those carcasses mattered: here was physical chupacabra evidence to test.

The scientific explanation: coyotes with mange

The best-known test came from Cuero, in South Texas. In the summer of 2007 a hairless, dog-like animal turned up dead on a ranch outside the town, and the rancher kept its head in her freezer. The San Antonio TV station KENS 5 passed a tissue sample to Texas State University, where Mike Forstner's laboratory sequenced a stretch of mitochondrial DNA and compared it with the public GenBank database. The university announced the result on 1 November 2007. Forstner called the sequence “a virtually identical match to DNA from the coyote”, and said he had expected a domestic dog.

Mange explains why a coyote could look so unlike one. The University of Michigan biologist Barry OConnor explained in 2010 that the mite Sarcoptes scabiei, which causes scabies in people, hits wild members of the dog family such as coyotes, foxes and wolves especially hard, because they have had little evolutionary time to develop defences. Burrowing mites inflame and thicken the skin and cut off the blood supply to the hair follicles, so the fur falls out, and secondary infections can give the animal a foul smell. A 2017 guide from Texas A&M AgriLife Extension matches the rest of the description: the grey colour is the coyote's own exposed skin, the scaly texture comes from the mites, and the ridge of spines is what is left of the guard hairs around the neck. It says the animal is usually a coyote and, rarely, a raccoon.

The vampire part has an ordinary explanation too. OConnor suggests that animals weakened by mange turn to livestock because they can no longer run down wild prey, and the Texas A&M guide notes that most losses blamed on the chupacabra involve animals confined in pens or corrals. Radford said that necropsies of chickens and goats killed by these animals found normal blood levels. They had not been drained.

As for the upright Puerto Rican creature, Radford traced its look to a single eyewitness sketch printed in a Puerto Rican newspaper in the second week of August 1995. He saw a strong resemblance to the alien-human hybrid in the 1995 science-fiction film Species, and when he interviewed the witness, she told him she had seen the film in the weeks before her report. Radford argues that the later reports across Latin America all go back to that one description.

What is still debated

The coyote explanation covers the Texas animals, because they were tested. It cannot be checked against the 1995 Puerto Rico creature in the same way, since no body of an upright, spiny animal has ever been produced. Radford's link to Species rests on the timing and on his interview with the witness, and he expected believers to object that she could not have described something that does not exist. His answer is confabulation, the common process by which people blend fiction they have seen into memories of real events.

Live Science adds a simple population argument: keeping a species alive would take a few hundred to a few thousand animals, and creatures of that size could hardly go without a single confirmed specimen or fossil on an island as small and densely populated as Puerto Rico. Radford has said he would accept a real find, and that he would be “happy to eat my crow and add a chapter to the book”. Meanwhile new chupacabra sightings keep coming in. The Texas A&M guide cautions that mange is easy to spot in the field but is not a definitive diagnosis, so each animal is best checked by a wildlife biologist.

Common questions

Verdict

Chupacabra explained in one line: the name covers two different things, and neither is an unknown animal. The upright Puerto Rican “goat sucker” goes back to a single eyewitness description that closely matches a monster from a 1995 film. The four-legged Texas chupacabra is a coyote, occasionally a raccoon, with severe mange, as DNA testing and wildlife specialists have shown. Livestock really died, but nothing in the record points to a blood-drinking creature. Real or Legend files the chupacabra as debunked.