Introducing Andrew Hall, a guest blogger from "An Apple a Day." His fresh-for-Luciole entry is: "Chupacabra: From Myth to Mainstream"
Posted by kluciole at 11/1/2010 7:05 PM 
Categories: news, opinions, National, Luciole Press, History, Friends, Metaphysical, International, Science, Cultures
Categories: news, opinions, National, Luciole Press, History, Friends, Metaphysical, International, Science, Cultures
Thank you so much Andrew and Tara! I know Luciole readers will be happy to check out
the An Apple a Day blog as well!
~ Karen
the An Apple a Day blog as well!
~ Karen
Chupacabra: From Myth to Mainstream
And so another myth is put to bed forever. The chupacabra - whose
name literally translates from the Spanish as "goat sucker" and was
long thought to be some sort of beast with an unproven (but possible)
existence, like the Sasquatch - has been reduced to simply being a breed of
wild dog or coyote suffering from extreme, terminal cases of mange.
The essential appeal of the chupacabra as a mythical creature (and
its rather substantial menace) comes from reports from farmers in Puerto Rico,
Mexico, areas in Latin America and the United States in which people found farm
animals and pets dead in large quantities with puncture wounds - like fangs -
and having had all of their blood sucked. People blamed these deaths on
vampires and on cults, then began blaming them on strange-looking creatures
with "dog-like, rodent-like or reptile-like" appearances with
"long snouts, large fangs, leathery or scaly greenish-gray skin and a
nasty odor." Given their malevolence and particular fondness for animal
blood, and the excitement inherent in discovering something, the myth of the
chupacabra spread as the killings did. Some people claimed that the chupacabra
could hop like a kangaroo, could make people feel nauseous, had a forked
tongue, and distinct fangs. By the mid-2000s, supposed chupacabras had even
been sighted in Russia.
Then, of course, came the media. There's a made-for-TV Scooby-Doo
movie, the films Chupacabra: Dark Seas and Guns of El Chupacabra,
episodes of "The X-Files" and "Dexter's Laboratory" and a
song by the tremendous Welsh indie rock band Super Furry Animals called
"Chupacabras" on their excellent album Radiator. Most of
these came within a few years of 1995, when the term chupacabra was coined,
things went quiet for a while.
However, the beast turned out to be nothing so magical. After
farmers killed animals to protect their livestock in Texas, analysis of the
carcasses proved that the supposed chupacabra was a coyote suffering from
extremely severe cases of demodectic or sarcoptic mange. Barry OConnor, a
biologist at the University of Michigan, theorizes that the majority of the
world's reported chupacabra sightings are in fact coyotes, and that the effects
of mange produce the chupacabra-like appearance, which produces substantial
hair loss in wild dogs (whereas it produces scabies in humans), and that
coyotes in particular are susceptible because domestic dogs, like and because
of centuries of human contact, can resist the scabies-causing mites in a way
that wild dogs cannot.
Because the coyote has no defenses, it takes on the distinct
appearance of the chupacabra, and because the mange weakens the animal so
dramatically, it loses its ability to hunt, prompting it to prey on livestock
and domestic animals over species that would put up more of a fight.
In the strangest of all footnotes, one highly influential supposed
chupacabra sighting was in fact based on an eyewitness description that turned
out to be most consistent with the alien from the horror movie Species,
released in 1995 (when the chupacabra myth gained momentum in pop culture) and
which the eyewitness had supposedly recently seen. All in all, a rather
reasonable conclusion to what was a fascinating - albeit farfetched - supposed
evil creature sighting.
Andrew Hall is a guest blogger for An Apple a Day and a writer on the
subject of medical transcription training for the
Guide to Health Education.
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