Chupacabra

The first filings came from smallholdings around Canóvanas, on the northern
coastal plain of Puerto Rico, in March 1995: eight sheep dead in one night,
each with a few punctures in the chest and no other injury. Comparable losses
came that year from Orocovis and Guánica. Those who saw an animal put it
upright at three to four feet, gray, with a ridge of spines down the back and
eyes several described as taking up too much of the head. The carcasses were
not fed on.

The dogs recur more reliably than the animal does. On farm after farm, in
statements taken by different people across four years, owners volunteered
without being asked that the working dogs made no sound in the night, and
several said the dogs would not enter the pen next morning. The company did
not add a question about dogs to the intake form until 1999, by which point
the observation stood in forty-one unconnected accounts.

Between 2004 and 2010, carcasses recovered in south Texas and submitted under
this designation returned coyote when genotyped, in each case an animal with
advanced sarcoptic mange, which strips the coat and thickens the skin. That
accounts for the hairless quadruped photographed in Texas. It does not account
for the Puerto Rico descriptions, which are of a biped, and no specimen from
the 1995 cluster survives: the owners buried or burned them, usually within a
day. Losses of the same pattern are still filed from the island.