NEWSPAPER COLUMNS
 ¶ Most Recent
¶ Miscellany
|
SUNDAY SPECTATOR
September 6, 2009
Chupacabra
Lest I miss the news, my chief Texas correspondent this week kindly forwarded links on the capture of a "chupacabra," or "goat sucker," in his estimable state, from such sources as CNN. No, he explained, he was not referring to Democrats ("they've been around forever"), but to a creature poisoned in a barn near Blanco, Texas, whose remains were then brought to the local taxidermist.And lest I contribute to the explosion of "chupacabra" queries in the search engines, let me also mention that it looks like a furless dog, dredged out of a peat bog. Abnormally mean-looking, to be sure, but then, animals have been known to flinch when poisoned, or, alternatively, if suffering from sarcoptic mange (which, incidentally, makes their hair fall out). Not that I want to rain skeptically on anyone's Bigfoot parade (oh no), but carcasses similar to the one exhibited on CNN had been hauled into the offices of taxidermists and other scientific authorities fairly frequently in recent years, even in the fine state of Texas, and were quickly shown to be dogs or coyotes. "El chupacabra" is a New World species of vampiric inclination, believed to suck the blood out of farm animals such as sheep and goats. By way of artistic flourish, they leave neat, geometrical punctures. Since such an attack was first reported in Puerto Rico in the 1990s, chupacabra sightings have spread, and are now on record from Chile to Maine. The animal thus enjoys, as I am informed by the usual Internet sources, a distinguished place in the annals of cryptozoology. This is the study of creatures observed by persons often without field training, and reported by them in an anecdotal manner, occasionally with the help of a rather grainy photograph. Bigfoot itself, the Loch Ness Monster and the Yeti are in this class, along with more than 200 other proposed cryptid species of less international renown. In Canada we have Ogopogo in Lake Okanagan, B.C., the Manipogo who inhabits Lake Manitoba, and the Igopogo of Lake Simcoe here in Ontario. Or to put it another way, we have a country with a very high ratio of lakes to people. In the Bigfoot family we have the man-eating Wendigo from the forests of Quebec, and the mighty Sasquatch, perhaps our national cryptid, for it has been spotted in every province and territory. I have removed Michael Ignatieff from the list, for while we have no confirmed report from a taxidermist, he has been captured on camera quite a few times. Occasionally, sightings bear fruit, as in such non-legendary cases as the okapi (a giraffid artiodactyl from the Ituri rainforest of central Africa), or the coelacanth (a very jawed fish from the Middle Devonian that began washing out of the Indian Ocean some decades ago). But for the most part, the many species that appear new to science came without preceding popular reports, so never made the list of cryptids. On the other hand, as I understand, cryptozoologists consider dragons and unicorns to be passé, and beneath inclusion in their investigative agenda. Indeed, creatures like our Wendigo and Sasquatch were perfectly fairytale and mythopoeic until they escaped from native Indian lore into the pages of our tabloids. We aren't supposed to tell stories that frighten children any more, at least according to the politically correct, who have wrong views on everything, including the theory that children have difficulty distinguishing fact from fiction (see my column of Aug. 16). I have a contrary, more plausible theory that children who were never told frightening stories about, e.g., abominable snowmen (or the giant, child-stealing grackles that I told my children about, or the immense howling wolf-spiders) tend to grow up with the most absurd beliefs, in things ranging from the existence of chupacabras to the possibility of "fairness." They are also at risk of abduction by aliens. Take, for instance, Miyuki Hatoyama, the new "first lady" of Japan, now assuming her fashionable place on the A-list of progressive first-spouses, with the pope-bashing Carla Bruni, current wife of the sex-dwarf president of France, and America's Michelle Obama. As we have learned through the media just this last week, the woman whose current husband is Yukio Hatoyama, landslide victor in Japan's lower house election, was taken to the planet Venus while sleeping, in a triangular UFO. She also met Tom Cruise in a former life, and hopes to make a movie with him before this one is over. And goodness knows what other revelations are available in a book whose title is, in English, Very Strange Things I've Encountered. She is also a champion of the macrobiotic diet. So what is my point, you ask? Two morals to today's column, for the price of one. The first is, at all costs, to avoid giving your daughters a progressive education. But the second is about the perils of democracy. I've heard arguments for taking the vote away from women, but I do not think they go far enough. As I survey the cast of characters now in control of the world's leading democracies, I think it is time we took the vote away from everybody. David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
|
Top