The Cuero Chupacabra: Phylis Canion's Blue-Grey Carcasses and the Texas State DNA Test

For years, something had been taking the chickens on Phylis Canion's ranch near Cuero, in DeWitt County, Texas. About 26 birds over two years, by one count. Canion was a rancher, a lifelong hunter and a naturopathic doctor, just back from Africa. The word she would soon reach for was chupacabra, the vampire beast of a legend born in Puerto Rico.

June 2007. Broad daylight. Canion saw a hairless canine figure with blue-gray flesh and bony limbs, slipping through the pastures of her ranch.

Soon after, she and her husband found a chicken with its throat torn open, apparently drained of blood. Over the next few days more birds turned up the same way. They were not eaten. They were not carried off. "All the blood was drained from them," Canion said.

Then came July. Over four days, Canion and her neighbours found three carcasses by the road just outside her ranch, along Highway 183. Each weighed about 40 pounds. The skin was grayish-blue and mostly hairless. The ears were big. The teeth were large and fanged. "It is one ugly creature," she said. "I've never seen anything like this." She thought heavy rains had flooded the animals out of their dens. She photographed the bodies and kept one head in her freezer. "I think it could have wolf in it."

Travis Schaar, a veterinarian in Victoria, examined the specimen. "I just think in my opinion a chupacabra is a dog," he said. State mammalogist John Young studied the photographs and judged the animal a grey fox with extreme mange.

The San Antonio station KENS-5 sent a tissue sample to Texas State University in San Marcos. On 1 November 2007, biologist Mike Forstner gave the answer. "The DNA sequence is a virtually identical match to DNA from the coyote (Canis latrans)." His conclusion was blunt. "The Cuero Chupacabra is a Texas Coyote." A year later, the UC Davis Veterinary Genetics Laboratory reported a coyote mother and a likely Mexican-wolf father. It is unclear whether that test used the 2007 head or another animal. "I knew it was something more than a coyote," Canion said.

Nobody has accused Canion of a hoax. The argument is about the animal. Benjamin Radford points to sarcoptic mange. Mites burrow into the skin and the hair falls out. The skin thickens, the face swells and the canine teeth look like fangs. No one has offered a specific account of the bloodless chickens. And Canion never accepted the verdict. "I have now done DNA at five different universities," she said in 2016. "They do not match any animal in the archive."

Cuero became the "Chupacabra Capital of the World." T-shirts reading "2007, The Summer of the Chupacabra" sold for $5 and shipped to Japan, Australia and Brunei. Discovery Channel and National Geographic Channel crews came to the ranch. In 2013, The Unexplained Files featured a blue dog Canion captured on camera. Radford gave the case a chapter in his 2011 book. The head, now mounted in her living room, has black leathery skin and bright blue eyes. For sceptics, it remains the textbook Texas chupacabra. A canid with severe mange.