My search for the blue dogs of Texas began in November 2004, when I visited a farm in Elmendorf, just south of San Antonio, where local rancher Devin McAnally had shot a hairless, blue-skinned canid in July that year. He took photographs of it to a local convenience store where one of the customers said that it looked just like the chupacabra that her grandmother had told her about when she was a girl.
Thus was born the legend of the Texas chupacabra. I took one look at the bones of the unfortunate creature and was convinced that it was nothing of the sort.
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But what were they?
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Once again, the description was of blue/grey, hairless, dog-like creatures larger than the largest coyote, with long muzzles and hunched backs.
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From the available evidence, they show at the very least that wolves are not entirely extinct in Texas, and we hypothesise that the discovery of these wolves may have enormous implications for the survival of the rarest sub-species. The Elmendorf creature is something else entirely. Whether or not it is a surviving member of the pre-Columbian domestic races of dog we may never know.
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