A couple in Ratcliffe, Texas who captured what they believed was a living chupacabra has had the creature euthanized.
Last week, Jackie and Bubba Strong saw the strange-looking animal eating corn in a tree and trapped it a cage.
The animal had a hairless back, large claws, lot of teeth and ferocious growl. Jackie decided it resembled the legendary "chupacabras" thought to attack and vampirize livestock in Latin America.
She named the creature "Chupie" and fed it corn and cat food for a few days.
On Friday, the couple made the decision to have a local animal shelter put "Chupie" to rest after a DeWitt County game warden said the animal appeared to have scabies, a contagious disease.
The Strongs plan to have "Chupie" stuffed by a taxidermist and sell his carcass online.
Although the news of the alleged chupacabra capture attracted worldwide attention, game warden Rex Mays told the Victoria Advocate that the truth is a lot less mystical.
"To me, it looked like a raccoon with severe mange," Mays told the newspaper. "It looks like a raccoon to me."
Ben Radford, a science-based paranormal investigator, goes along with the raccoon hypothesis. He says one look at the creature's mouth proves that it is physically impossible for the animals to suck blood.
"The mouth and jaw structures of raccoons, dogs and coyotes prevent them from creating a seal around their victims, and, therefore, physically prevents them from sucking the blood out of goats or anything else," he wrote on LIveScience.com. "This Ratcliffe chupacabra was not seen nor videotaped sucking blood from anything."
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