Long before anybody was worried about goats in Puerto Rico, English had a bird called the goatsucker.
That isn't a nickname. It's the formal scientific name. Nightjars are the family Caprimulgidae, from the Latin capra, nanny goat, and mulgere, to milk. Spanish calls the same birds chotacabras, built the same way, making the same accusation. The charge is that they come into the fields after dark and drink milk straight out of the animals.
Aristotle wrote it down around 350 BCE in his History of Animals. Pliny the Elder repeated it in his Natural History, and from there it rode into English, into Spanish, and into the permanent taxonomy of an entire family of birds, where it sits today, in Latin, wrong.
What nightjars are actually doing out there is eating insects. Livestock attract bugs, the birds hunt at dusk with enormous mouths for their size, and so they spend the evening near the herd with their faces open. That is the entire evidentiary basis for twenty-three centuries of thinking they were on the udder.
Farmers found their animals wrong in the morning. Something nobody had gotten a proper look at was out there near the herd at night. Those two facts got introduced to each other and never divorced.
Then, twenty-three centuries later, on an island in the Caribbean, in a different language, about a different animal, somebody built the same sentence again.
They called it the chupacabras.
The name is an ordinary Spanish compound and an English punchline
Verb, then noun. Sucks-goats.
That's a completely standard way to build a word in Spanish. It's how you get a corkscrew, sacacorchos, pulls-corks. It's how you get a can opener, abrelatas. An umbrella is a paraguas, a stops-waters, which I think about more than a grown woman should. The construction is workmanlike. It's the linguistic equivalent of labeling a drawer.
So when Puerto Ricans in 1995 started using the word, they were doing roughly what you do when you point at a thing on the counter and call it the opener. Something is killing the animals. It's the goat one.
Then it crosses into English.
And in English, "goat sucker" is not a label. It's a bit. It has a rimshot attached. It sounds like something a cartoon coyote would be called in an episode nobody remembers, and I would like to point out that the English-language coverage of this story never really recovered from that first laugh, because it got the joke before it got a single fact, and once you've got the joke you're done listening.
Anyway. Canóvanas, Puerto Rico. March 1995.
What happened in Canóvanas in 1995
Eight sheep were found dead near Canóvanas in March 1995. The reports said each carried three puncture wounds in the chest, and that the animals had been drained of blood.
I'm going to flag that second part now rather than later, because it's the claim the whole legend is built on and it is the claim with the least behind it. Exsanguination is something people asserted. Blood pools inside a body after death and stops looking like blood, which is why a farmer opening up a dead animal, or a neighbor looking at one in a field, can very honestly conclude there's none in there. No independent necropsy from those first cases has ever been produced that establishes an empty animal. Say it as folklore, because that's what it is.
Folklore.
What isn't folklore is the count. Through 1995 the killings kept coming, and the figures that got repeated in the coverage were around 150 animals in the Canóvanas area alone and, by the end of the year, more than a thousand across the island attributed to whatever this was.
Those were somebody's animals.
I want that to sit there for a second before we get to the part with the movie and the T-shirts, because a goat is not a punchline when it's your goat. A goat is four hundred dollars, or a season of milk, or the reason a kid has shoes. Small-scale livestock keeping is not a hobby and the people doing it were, in the actual and literal sense, being robbed, night after night, by something they could not see and could not shoot, and the response of a considerable slice of the mainland press was to make a face and reach for the word "goatsucker."
The mayor of Canóvanas, José "Chemo" Soto, took volunteers up into the hills on armed search parties, repeatedly, over a period of months. At one point he used a caged goat as bait.
You are welcome to find that funny. A lot of people did. I'd just note that an elected official whose constituents are losing livestock every week and who does not have the option of saying "hmm, interesting" and going back inside is, at minimum, a man doing something, and the something available to him was a goat in a cage and a group of neighbors with flashlights. They never caught anything.
Madelyne Tolentino, a window, and a movie that had opened that July
In August 1995, a Canóvanas resident named Madelyne Tolentino reported seeing the creature through a window at her house.
Her description is the one everybody has, whether they know it or not. Every drawing, every Halloween costume, every mascot: this is the source. She described something roughly four to five feet tall, standing on two legs, with a line of spines or quills running down its back from the head, large dark oval eyes, small arms with claws, and gray skin she called rubbery.
That is a lot of detail.
That's not a dog, and it isn't anything else with a name either. It's also an unusually specific account, delivered by a person who had no discernible reason to be inventing one, and it traveled across the island fast.
Then there's the timing, which is the reason people are still arguing about this thirty-one years later.
The film Species opened on July 7, 1995. Its alien, Sil, was designed by H. R. Giger, the artist behind the creature in Alien, and in her non-human form Sil is a bipedal figure with clawed hands, huge dark eyes, and a row of spikes running down her spine.
Yeah.
The investigator Benjamin Radford spent five years on this and published the argument in his 2011 book Tracking the Chupacabra: The Vampire Beast in Fact, Fiction, and Folklore. His finding is that Tolentino had seen Species before her sighting, and that she referred to the film herself when describing what she saw. In her own words, quoted by Radford: "It was a creature that looked like the chupacabra, with spines on its back and all."
Radford's conclusion is that the single most influential eyewitness description in the entire case cannot be trusted, and that an animal assembled on top of a description that came out of a movie theater is not much of an animal. He does not claim it settles what killed the sheep. He is fairly careful about that, and most people repeating him are not.
Where the Species argument gets contested
It is not a settled matter and I'd be doing you dirty if I pretended it were.
The main objection raised against Radford is one of scale. Tolentino was one witness. Hundreds of people across Puerto Rico reported seeing something during that period, and critics of the Species theory argue that hanging the entire phenomenon on one woman and one movie ignores everybody else who came forward. If the description was contagious rather than original, fine, but contagion needs a first case and the theory has to explain why so many people caught it.
The counter to the counter, and Radford makes it, is that the later descriptions came after hers, in an environment saturated with her account, which is exactly what you'd expect if the description spread rather than repeated.
There is also a wobble in the record itself, and it's worth knowing about. Tolentino's account as given in the mid-nineties and her account as given years later differ in substantial ways: the number of people involved, what they did, what happened at the end. The earlier telling has a whole cast, a chase, a boy examining the thing's teeth. The later one is two people at a window. That kind of drift is completely normal in human memory and it is also the reason you can't treat a fifteen-year-old retelling as the same evidence as the first one.
What I'd hold onto: the animal deaths were real and they cost people money, and the question of what a creature looked like is a separate question from the question of what killed the sheep. Those got welded together early and they have never been separated since.
Also, this wasn't the first time. In 1975, in Moca, on the western side of the island, a run of livestock deaths with the same reported signature got the local press calling it el Vampiro de Moca, the Moca Vampire. Cows, goats, geese, a pig. Police blamed wild dogs. The deaths tapered off by that summer and no explanation ever landed that satisfied anyone. Twenty years before the word chupacabra existed, the same island had the same problem under a different name, and nobody involved had seen Species, on account of it not existing. Which doesn't prove anything on its own. It just means the description and the dead animals have never actually needed each other.
The Texas carcasses everybody photographed
Then the thing crossed water and turned into something else entirely.
This is the part that almost never gets said out loud, so I'll say it: there are two chupacabras and they have nothing to do with each other except a shared word. The Puerto Rican one stands on two legs, has spines down its back, and has never been found. The American one is on four legs, has no hair, and turns up in freezers and pickup beds constantly, because it's a dog. They don't look alike or move alike. One is a sighting and the other is a body, which is normally the difference between a legend and a specimen, except that here the specimen got handed the legend's name and everybody agreed to stop noticing.
By the 2000s, "chupacabra" in the American Southwest had stopped meaning a spiny bipedal creature at a window and started meaning a specific and very recognizable object: a dead four-legged animal, hairless, gray or blue-gray, with skin like a rolled roast and a set of teeth that look wrong because there's no fur around them. If you have ever seen a chupacabra photo shared by a relative, it was one of these.
Two of them made national news.
In 2004, outside Elmendorf, Texas, a rancher shot a hairless animal that had been going after his livestock, and the body went to the University of California, Davis for DNA analysis. Coyote with sarcoptic mange.
In July 2007, near Cuero, Texas, a woman named Phylis Canion and some neighbors found the bodies of three animals over about four days. Roughly forty pounds each. Hairless, grayish-blue, big teeth. Canion kept one of the heads in her freezer, which is either alarming or extremely sensible depending on how you personally would handle finding a monster in the yard, and I want to be on the record as thinking it was sensible, because a person with a specimen in a freezer is a person who can be checked, and almost nobody in the entire history of this subject can be checked.
In November 2007, biologists at Texas State University in San Marcos ran the DNA. Mike Forstner's statement: "The DNA sequence is a virtually identical match to DNA from the coyote."
Later testing at UC Davis on the Cuero material came back with coyote on the maternal side and, per Canion's account of the results, Mexican wolf on the paternal side. So: a canid. A wild dog with an unusual family situation and a skin condition.
Nothing that has ever gone to a lab has come back as a new animal.
How mange turns a coyote into a monster
The skin condition is doing more work in this story than any other single fact, so it's worth understanding rather than just accepting.
Sarcoptes scabiei is a mite. In humans it's scabies. In canids it's sarcoptic mange, and what the mite does is burrow into the skin to lay eggs, which sets off an allergic reaction so severe the animal scratches and chews itself for weeks. The hair goes first, in patches, then in most places. The skin underneath, chronically inflamed and constantly traumatized, thickens and wrinkles and turns gray. Secondary bacterial infection follows, which is where the smell in the reports comes from.
Ugh.
What you end up with is an animal that has lost the outline you'd recognize it by. Nearly all of what a coyote looks like is coat. Strip that and you're left with a long narrow skull, an oddly small body, disproportionately visible teeth, and skin the color of a dirty eraser.
In October 2010, the University of Michigan biologist Barry O'Connor put the whole American side of the legend on this, and added the part that closes the loop. An animal that far gone is in no shape to run down a rabbit. It's starving, weak, and slow, so it goes where the food doesn't move: pens, hutches, tied-up goats, chickens. The mange doesn't only explain what the thing looked like. It explains what the thing was doing at the fence in the first place.
O'Connor also suggested the original Puerto Rican animal may have been a monkey with mange, which I'll pass along and immediately flag as the weakest brick in an otherwise very solid wall, since Puerto Rico's feral monkeys are a real population but nobody has ever produced one of these bodies from the island.
Is the chupacabra real? The honest answer
Nobody has ever produced the Puerto Rican animal, and nobody has ever produced a new species. Every carcass ever handed to a lab has come back canid, and the ones that came back weird came back weird for a reason with a name and a treatment.
Meanwhile the nightjar is still called a goatsucker in two languages and in the taxonomy, having done nothing, for two thousand years. Names outlast their evidence by an embarrassing margin.
The 1995 Puerto Rican livestock deaths are a separate matter and deserve a separate answer, which is: something killed those animals, and the most likely candidates were always feral and stray dogs, which kill livestock constantly and everywhere and in exactly this pattern, and which nobody wants as an answer because dogs are not interesting. The puncture wounds are consistent with canine teeth. The "drained of blood" part is consistent with people looking at a dead animal and drawing a reasonable, incorrect conclusion.
It was probably dogs.
Which is the file, more or less. There's no version of this where I get to hand you a monster.
What's real is a run of losses across an island, and a description that showed up at the exact moment a very similar creature happened to be on a lot of screens. Everything after that got built later, by other people, mostly not there.
The chupacabra now: hot sauce, baseball, and what stayed behind
By now the chupacabra is a mascot. It's on hot sauce and beer cans, it's a minor-league baseball team, it's a Halloween aisle, it's a Scooby-Doo villain, it's shorthand in a hundred TV scripts written by people who have never looked up where Canóvanas is. Puerto Rico has its own merchandise too, and I have zero interest in scolding anyone for selling a shirt, since a legend that pays for something is doing better than most legends.
But look at what actually made the crossing.
The spines made it, obviously, and so did the dark eyes and the gray rubbery skin and the fangs and the general air of an alien from a summer movie about an alien. The name made it too, though it arrived stripped of the grammar that made it ordinary and carrying a laugh it never had at home.
What didn't make it is everything with a number attached to it. Eight sheep in March. A hundred and fifty animals gone from one municipality by August, and a mayor going up into the hills at night with volunteers and borrowed rifles and a goat in a cage, because that was the only plan available. More than a thousand animals across the island inside a single year, each of which belonged to a specific person who had been counting on it and now had to go tell somebody at home.
Every part of that is documented and none of it is on the T-shirt.
So the next time the word comes up and everybody laughs, and you laugh too, because it is a genuinely funny word, understand that the joke you're laughing at is the translation, and the thing it was translated from was a bill that came due in another language.
