Dog Shoots Man ... Is The Dog Related to Dick Cheney?

Hunting dog steps on shotgun, shoots his master in leg

DES MOINES - A hunter is recovering after he was shot in the leg at close range by his dog, who stepped on his shotgun and tripped the trigger, an official said yesterday.

James Harris, 37, of Tama, was hit in the calf Saturday, the opening day of Iowa's pheasant season, said Alan Foster, a spokesman with the Iowa Department of Natural Resources.

"He had surgery and is doing pretty well," he said. "He took between 100-120 pellets in about a 4-inch circle to his calf."

He was hunting with a group about three miles north of Grinnell. The group shot a bird and when Mr. Harris went to get it, he put his gun on the ground and crossed a fence. As he crossed the fence, his hunting dog stepped on the gun, Mr. Foster said.

No one else was hurt and the dog was not injured.

ASSOCIATED PRESS

Mythical Beast in Texas Is Just a Coyote

I'm *really* glad that this has been settled... Can we start looking for the Tooth Fairy and the Easter Bunny now?
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SAN MARCOS, Texas - The results are in: The ugly, big-eared animal found this summer in southern Texas is not the mythical, bloodsucking chupacabra. It's just a plain old coyote.

Biologists at Texas State University announced Thursday night they had identified the hairless doglike creature.



KENS-TV of San Antonio provided a tissue sample from the animal for testing.

"The DNA sequence is a virtually identical match to DNA from the coyote," biologist Mike Forstner said in a statement. "This is probably the answer a lot of folks thought might be the outcome. I, myself, really thought it was a domestic dog, but the Cuero Chupacabra is a Texas Coyote."

Phylis Canion and some of her neighbors discovered the 40-pound bodies of three of the animals over four days in July outside her ranch in Cuero, 90 miles southeast of San Antonio.

Canion said she saved the head of the one she found so she could get to the bottom of its ancestry through DNA testing and then mount it for posterity.

Chupacabra means "goat sucker" in Spanish, and it is said to have originated in Puerto Rico and Mexico.

Additional skin samples have been taken to try to determine the cause of the animal's hair loss, Forstner said.

Source: Associated Press/AP Online


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