Nine Chupacabras Went To The Lab. Nine Coyotes Came Back.
Eleven years of case summaries from a Texas state veterinary laboratory. Eight had advanced sarcoptic mange, which strips the coat, thickens the hide and changes the gait. The ninth is the interesting one, and it is not what anybody hoped.
COLLEGE STATION, Tex. — Between 2015 and 2026, nine animals were brought to a Texas state veterinary diagnostic laboratory by people who thought they had shot something that was not a coyote.
All nine were coyotes, or nearly.
What mange does
Dr. Amadou Lindqvist-Reyes spent twenty minutes on the mite and was, by his own admission, having the best afternoon of his week.
Sarcoptes scabiei burrows into the skin. The animal scratches. The scratching and the immune response together cause the hair to come out and the skin to thicken, harden, and go grey-blue. Advanced cases lose almost all their coat. The skin over the shoulders and rump goes leathery and wrinkles into folds.
What is left, he said, is an animal with a coyote's skeleton, no fur, grey hide, prominent spine and hips, disproportionately large ears and canine teeth relative to the shrunken face, and a gait altered by chronic pain.
"It does not look like a coyote," he said. "It genuinely does not. That is not a failure of observation on the rancher's part, and I am tired of people talking about ranchers as though they cannot recognise a coyote. They can. They have seen ten thousand coyotes. This does not look like one."
The eight
Eight of the nine were coyotes with advanced sarcoptic mange. Dr. Ofelia Santibáñez-Krogh's case summaries record hair loss between 80 and 100 per cent, secondary bacterial infection in six, and emaciation in seven.
All eight had normal canid dentition, which is the detail that settles it in every case and which the laboratory photographs at the same three angles every time.
Elmer Cuthbertson-Vance, who submitted specimen 4 in 2019 and agreed to be named, was direct about it.
"They told me it was a coyote with mange and showed me the teeth," he said. "I said, that's a coyote. They said, that's a coyote. I said, well, all right then. People act like I was disappointed. I was relieved. I have goats."
The ninth
Specimen 9, submitted in March, is not a coyote with mange.
It is a coyote–domestic dog cross with mange, which the laboratory's genetics report describes as "consistent with" a first- or second-generation hybrid and declines to characterise further.
Hybrids are bigger, differently proportioned, and carry a mix of skull morphology that makes an already unfamiliar animal more unfamiliar still. Specimen 9 weighed 24 kilograms, which is at the top of the range for a coyote in that county and would be unremarkable for a large dog.
"That is the one I would want people to look at," Dr. Santibáñez-Krogh said. "Not because it is mysterious. Because it is a wild population and a domestic population producing offspring, in a place where that is not supposed to be common, and that is a real thing worth knowing about that nobody is going to write about because the answer is a dog."
The sentence the laboratory wanted printed
Dr. Santibáñez-Krogh asked, at the end of a long afternoon, that this newspaper print one thing above everything else in the piece.
"Nine is not a lot," she said. "Nine is the nine that got brought in. Everybody who reads this will want to know what percentage of these reports are mange and the honest answer is that I cannot tell you, because I only see the ones somebody put in a truck."
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Sources & Method
A state laboratory keeps case summaries. We asked for eleven years of them for a specific submission category, obtained the submitters' consent to be named, and had the parasitology explained by someone who does not work for the laboratory.
Who we spoke to
- Dr. Ofelia Santibáñez-Krogh, Veterinary pathologist, state diagnostic laboratory. Interviewed in person; conducted or supervised all nine necropsies 24 June 2026 Released the case summaries with the submitters' consent.
- Four ranchers who submitted specimens, Named individually in the story with their consent. Interviewed by telephone June–July 2026
- Dr. Amadou Lindqvist-Reyes, Parasitologist. Interviewed by video call 28 June 2026 Explains what Sarcoptes scabiei does to a coyote, at length and with enthusiasm.
What we could not confirm
- The identity of specimen 9's sire. The genetics are consistent with a coyote–domestic dog cross and the laboratory would not go further than 'consistent with'.
- Whether the nine are a representative sample. They are the nine that were submitted, which is not the same thing, and the laboratory said so first.
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