I am getting profoundly sick of
the sickly raccoon fairy tale. Healthy
raccoons go not seriously attack animals larger than themselves or those mostly
smaller either. They are opportunistic
fussy omnivores. This critter has a set
of fairly powerful hind legs which must be noted and it is generally short
coated which allows distance running as well.
I think that this sucker can actually run down rabbits and jackrabbits
as well. We do not know what it is.
That this one attacked much
larger animals is unusual. Yet the
damage to the cows suggests we are dealing with a berserk attack rodent of some
sort. Yet the loss of the goats tells us
we are surely dealing with a much larger creature.
You would think that they would
carefully inspect those fangs for blood channels also. That also would explain damage around the
head of a cow and the loss of the goats whose bodies must be discoverable. A pack of small blood sucking attack rodents
could cause this damage including the goat loss if such actually exists.
Hopefully someone gats this
sample and does a proper work up on it.
Did elusive chupacabra attack farmer’s cows?
Wildlife experts suspect
sickly raccoon
Last
updated: May 28. 2014 1:17PM - 1855 Views
RED SPRINGS — After the
disappearance of two goats, evidence of attacks on his cows and some mysterious
late-night howls, James Newton believes he has found the culprit — the
chupacabra, a creature many experts don’t believe exists.
Newton, who owns a farm
with his wife, Vanessa, on Dixie Road, had been noticing unusual happenings
since taking over the land more than a year ago, including the unexplained loss
of two goats in December, and discovering his cows with bloody ears that he
believes were evidence of a creature trying to bite the animals.
On Monday morning, Newton
said his wife alerted him to what she described as “the ugliest animal you’d ever
seen” behind their house.
The creature, which they
believe may have been killed by the couple’s German shepherd, was 2-feet long,
had short, dark gray hair, a lon,g thin tail, protruding teeth and — according to Newton — an uncanny resemblance to a creature
popularly known as a chupacabra.
“I looked it up on
the Internet before I called anyone, and sure enough, if you look it up
online, you’ll see this looks exactly like the chupacabras people have been
spotting,” Newton said. “On the Internet, a man actually shot one on his
porch.”
“Chupacabra” is a Spanish
word that literally translates to “goat sucker.” Reports of the creature can be
traced back to Puerto Rico in 1994, when eight sheep were reportedly attacked
and drained of blood. Since 1994, a consensus has been formed on how the
creature supposedly looks among those who have claimed to have caught the
creature in the act.
The most common features
used to describe the chupacabra are dark skin, little to no hair, a long, thin
tail and protruding canines.
“What they do is they
grab a hold of them and suck the blood out of them,” Newton said. “Every time
they find ‘em, the bodies of animals they’ve attacked, they have the blood
sucked out of them. This one man had 100 chickens and it just sucked the blood
out of every one of his chickens … All it has to do is latch on to an animal
and hold on. Now, a goat can be up to 200 pounds. If one of these things can
take down a goat, then taking down a full-grown man wouldn’t be a problem. ”
While there have been a
number of cases in which people have found an animal, dead or alive, that they
believe to be a chupacabra, skeptics have been quick to dismiss these
discoveries as dogs, coyotes or some other kind of animal suffering from mange.
In the case of Newton’s
chupacabra, both Dr. Curt Locklear of Lumberton’s Southeastern Veterinary
Hospital and Tommy Rains, wildlife damage control agent with Cape Fear Wildlife
Control, seem to agree, from only viewing photographs, that the body is likely
that of a raccoon.
“That is definitely a
raccoon, but one that had been under a lot of stress,” Rains said. “Skin
disease and malnourishment can make it look like that. It does look a lot like
the pictures of a chupacabra though.”
Rains added that in his
16 years of working as a wildlife damage control agent, this was the first time
he had been asked to identify a chupacabra. Both Locklear and Rains warn that a
raccoon that sickly may have been infected with rabies and have suggested that
Newton have his dog checked for the virus. More than a dozen cases of rabies
were reported during an outbreak of the disease in Robeson County last year.
“I think that chupacabras
may exist, I am not saying they don’t,” Rains said. “Just that I have skinned a
lot of raccoons over the years and after you skin an animal, it becomes much
easier to recognize the way their body and bones are shaped.”
Newton remains convinced.
“See, it has hair on its
back, but no hair on the legs,” Newton said. “I thought it was a ‘coon, but a
‘coon ain’t that color. They have white around their eyes, and he’s got tan
color up there.”
Newton and his wife said
they will be keeping an eye out for any other chupacabras and keeping a close
watch on their four dogs.
“I had never seen
anything like that,” Vanessa Newton said. “It is scary to see something that
looks like that, and the way I see it, if there is one, then there is another
one.”
No comments:
Post a Comment