The Ratcliffe Chupacabra Capture

Ratcliffe is a small community in DeWitt County, South Texas, about 8 miles west of Cuero. Texas knows the chupacabra well. Texas Parks and Wildlife gets three or four chupacabra calls a year. Researchers had long argued that most American cases were animals with mange.

It began on a Sunday night. A couple saw an animal eating corn in a tree on their property. The husband trapped it, then called his wife over to look. Jackie Stock did not hesitate. "Bubba, that looks like a baby chupacabra."

She described a hairless back, large claws and countless teeth. Then there was the sound. A ferocious growl. Arlen Parma, a man who had hunted raccoons for two decades, said the growl was one of the strongest signs this was no raccoon or possum. "I hunted coons for 20 years with dogs and I ain't never seen nothing looks like that right there." Reports differ on whether Parma was the trapper himself or a neighbour.

This was no fleeting glimpse. The family kept the animal alive at their home for several days. They fed it cat food and corn. A crew from KAVU-TV in Victoria filmed it in its cage, picking up food with its paws. According to the KAVU reporter, most people in DeWitt County were convinced this was the elusive chupacabra. By 3 April 2014 the video had gone national, carried by CNN affiliates, ABC stations, TMZ and NBC.

Brent Ortego, a Wildlife Diversity Biologist at Texas Parks and Wildlife, studied the footage. "The animal in the cage as best I can tell from the view is some sort of a small canine," he said. He suggested a coyote, dog or fox, most likely with mange, and noted the chupacabra "has never been proven to be a unique species." Later reports say he came round to a raccoon with mange.

The DeWitt County game warden, named in later reports as Rex Mays, was firmer. "To me, it looked like a raccoon with severe mange." Since it did appear to be a raccoon, he said, it had to be released or euthanized. Spokesman Mike Cox said the agency planned no enforcement action and no further investigation.

Then came a voicemail to the warden. The animal had been put down. The family said a local shelter put it to sleep humanely because they believed it was suffering. The shelter's name was withheld because of the threats it was receiving. No DNA test was done.

Benjamin Radford, writing in Live Science on 4 April 2014, made the case for a raccoon with sarcoptic mange. It was found in a tree, which suits a raccoon but not a dog or coyote. It handled food with its paws. Without fur it had lost the dark bandit mask that makes a raccoon easy to recognise. Its mouth, he added, could not form the seal needed to suck blood. "This Ratcliffe chupacabra was not seen nor videotaped sucking blood from anything."

Nobody accused the family of a hoax. The argument was only ever about the species.

The Ratcliffe animal joined a long line of Texas chupacabras traced back to mange. In 2010 Barry O'Connor of the University of Michigan had linked American chupacabras to mange in coyotes. Radford also pointed to a 1950s Texas "chupacabra" that Darren Naish identified as a mangy raccoon. Still, for a few days in 2014, a family in DeWitt County had a cage, a growl and a question the whole country wanted answered.