'Vampire' stalks Siberian livestock

A blood-sucking creature is preying upon goats near Novosibirsk. As rational explanations run thin on the ground, the specter of the so-called chupacabra raises its demon head.
Horrified farmers and smallholders are confronted by the drained corpses of their livestock in the morning, bloodless and bearing puncture marks to the neck but otherwise largely in tact.
But local cops are reluctant to record apparent vampire attacks, as they await official recertification, leaving the locals up in arms.

Blood-suckers
“If this creature is not stopped it could make its way to Novosibirsk! Only our police force are doing jack-diddly about it,” complaining locals told Komsomolskaya Pravda. “They say that there is no Chupacabra. Come if you will journalists, have a look at what is happening to us.”

Death in the night
Local animal keeper Natalya told of her experiences.
“It all happened on the night of June 10,” she told KP. “I was sleeping, my daughter was sitting at the computer looking at the internet. She says that about 2.00 am she heard a sound in the yard. Some whining.
“The dog which guards the farm screamed for 15 minutes and then quietened down. The dog’s behavior drew the attention of my daughter Natalie, but she didn’t think it was important. She thought that if a stranger had come to the house then the dog would bark. And here it was more like whining, you think of howling at the moon.
“In the morning it became clear why the dog had been howling. I got up and went to the barn to milk the goats. I looked and saw right on the doorstep a goat with its neck thrown back unnaturally. On the neck there was something like a bite mark, the belly was torn, and there were huge claw marks. I came over bad and started screaming, I ran to the house to see the children were alright,” she said.
Whatever killed the goats never tried to eat the flesh, it just drank its victim’s blood.

From the devil
Natalya’s news of a near-mythical chupacabra spread like wildfire among residents of Krasnoginnoe village, then it became clear that nearby Tolmachevskoye and Chick villages had also been afflicted.
The blood-suckers had targeted cattle in Tolmochevskoye. “It’s come from the devil. I’ve seen it. My brother, even when he lived near St Petersburg seven years ago accidently photographed a chupacabra. He took the usual family picture and then saw the demonic face through the kitchen window. Grey-red it was, such an unpleasant face, like a bat with fangs,” Natalie’s uncle Viktor Shushpanov told KP.
“My brother showed me this photograph and upon the advice of his family he burned it,” he said.

Ring the church bells
“All the people are scared, they fear that the creature will move onto children,” the head of the village said. “We have organized night patrols of six people. We walk through the village, on the look out for this wickedness. But so far we have had no results.”
While hopes for speedy retribution are fast diminishing the beast has turned out to be a boon to troubled parents, presenting a very useful threat for naughty children.
The chupacabra is a recent legend, originating from mid 1990s North America. It is supposedly a heavy creature, the size of a small bear, with a row of spines reaching from the neck to the base of the tail.
But there seems to be a more prosaic explanation: Discovery News reported in 2010 that what were believed to be chupacabra in the Americas turned out to be wild dogs infected with a deadly form of mange. The University of Michigan put forward a similar theory.