The Cuero Chupacabra: Phylis Canion's Blue-Skinned Carcasses, Texas 2007

Phylis Canion was a lifelong hunter and a naturopathic doctor who had lived in Africa for four years. Her ranch sat outside Cuero, in DeWitt County, Texas. For a couple of years, something had been killing her chickens and cats. As many as 26 chickens. None of their meat was eaten or carried off. All their blood was drained.

June 2007. Canion had just come back from Africa. In daylight, on her ranch, she saw it. A hairless canine figure with blue-gray flesh and bony limbs. Soon afterwards a chicken was found with its throat torn open, apparently drained of blood.

Then came July. Over four days, Canion and some of her neighbours found three bodies on and near the road outside her ranch. A neighbouring rancher reported one hit by a car near his property. Another lay closer to her land. She loaded it into her tractor and photographed it. Each weighed about 40 pounds. Big ears. Large fanged teeth. Grayish-blue, mostly hairless skin.

"I've seen a lot of nasty stuff. I've never seen anything like this," she said. She called them chupacabras. She kept one head in her freezer for DNA testing.

At the end of August, an Associated Press story by Elizabeth White, with photographs by Eric Gay, carried the case around the world. San Antonio station KENS-TV said the attention reached as far as Saudi Arabia. Canion sold $5 T-shirts reading "2007, The Summer of the Chupacabra, Cuero, Texas." They shipped to Japan, Australia and Brunei. "It's good for Cuero," she said.

State Mammalogist John Young of Texas Parks & Wildlife looked at her pictures and suggested a gray fox with an extreme case of mange. Veterinarian Travis Schaar of Victoria offered his own view. "I just think in my opinion a chupacabra is a dog."

KENS-TV paid for a tissue sample to be tested at Mike Forstner's lab at Texas State University in San Marcos. On 1 November 2007 the answer came. "The DNA sequence is a virtually identical match to DNA from the coyote (Canis latrans)." Forstner had expected a domestic dog. In February 2008 KENS reported a second test at UC Davis. Coyote on the mother's side. Mexican wolf on the father's.

Dog breeders thought the carcass looked like a Xoloitzcuintle, a Mexican Hairless dog. Mongabay called the story a hoax to sell T-shirts. The DNA ruled out the Xolo, and no source claims the bodies were fabricated. Benjamin Radford, author of Tracking the Chupacabra, points to a coyote with severe hair loss, most likely sarcoptic mange. Blood pools in the lower body after death, he notes, so a carcass can look drained when it isn't.

Canion has not moved. "I have now done DNA at five different universities. All of them came back identical. They do not match any animal in the archive."

Cuero became known as the "Chupacabra Capital of the World." Mayor Sara Post-Meyer says that nickname has since been replaced. Canion became "the Chupacabra Lady," and her specimen became a taxidermy mount in her living room. The case followed the Elmendorf Beast of 2004, near San Antonio. The chupacabra's modern image goes back to Canóvanas, Puerto Rico, in 1995. In Cuero, for a few weeks, it seemed to have a body.