The Turner Beast
The History Channel’s Monster Quest show on Wednesday, December 5th, dealth with the so called “Turner Beast” - mutant canines and all that jazz.
Frankly, we don’t really understand what all the uproar is about - this thing got an entire hour of TV?
Look at this picture:
Looks like a half-chow half-something else to our untrained eyes.
Oh wait, DNA analysis on this “beast” confirmed it was a domestic dog! Oh REALLY???
Here’s Turner Maine on a map:
Read even more details over at Cryptomundo.
Dan on 23 Jan 2008 at 10:13 pm #
Dude i’m from turner and i completely agree, freggen idiots here flipped out and now all of Maine looks stupid because of a few hicks that got excited after watching too may shows like Monster Quest
Bill Futreal on 24 Jan 2008 at 3:23 pm #
Hey Dan - How totally true - thanks for chiming in from Maine!
cassidy on 26 Jan 2008 at 6:59 pm #
I agree too! I am so scarde of the beast if it was still alive!
Beast of turner on 26 Jan 2008 at 7:01 pm #
ok, well this is a beast all right! I agree cassidy and dan!
abby on 01 Mar 2008 at 5:15 am #
I agree with all of y’all.
AJP on 05 Mar 2008 at 7:20 pm #
Chow half breed possibly Pit Bull could be product of Vick era dogfights that are know for breeding dogs with natural fighting disposition.
alilondashrtside on 05 Mar 2008 at 7:58 pm #
I dont know what the hype is all about. if it is a dog its a damn dog, if its something else perhaps not of this lifetime then so be it cockroaches , alligators, crocodiles, lizards , etc….. are all animals that have been around forever just let it be and let it go. move on . i am from Maine and its embarrassing to be associated with bullcrap like this. its embarrassing enough to listen to all the dumb hick jokes, dumb redneck jokes as it is, people you are only feeding it..
lonewolf on 05 Mar 2008 at 11:55 pm #
ive been studing wolves since i was a little kid and i know what to do if i ever cross one this animal grabed my attention quickly its not a dog or a wolf i know for sure but would like to study this animal somemore i am a good tracker i hunt deer in the woodsanyways thanks …sign lonewolf
Sharktown on 07 Mar 2008 at 12:02 pm #
Being from New Jersey the story intrigued me until I found out the truth.
The DNA of the “beast” was sent to a lab and it came back as just ordinary dog DNA. No monster just a horrible looking dog that was probably in poor health and bad breeding.
casco canid on 10 Mar 2008 at 12:59 pm #
“Maine looks stupid because of a few hicks that got excited after watching too may shows like Monster Quest”
I run a store in nearby Casco, Maine and heard accounts of sightings of an animal fitting the same desciption by some customers who probably never heard of”MonsterQuest” They don’t say they “saw a mutant”, just an animal they basically hadn’t seen before in the area. I think some may be sightings of
fisher cats living around and when my wife saw one across the street at the millpond she could not identify it, but upon talking to neighbors (and a visit to Gray Animal Park) we’re pretty certain that’s what it was. They have killed plenty of small domestic animals (mostly house cats) in our neighborhood as well. The existence of these animals (and that many people have never heard of them) probably fuels a “mystery killer of small pets” rumor in this area. Our employee saw something he could not identify just last week, he described it in nearly identical terms to “sightings” made in the past. When I jokingly asked him if it was the “Mystery Beast of Androscoggin County” he said he’d never heard of ANY of the legends (”Maine Mutant”, “Turner Beast”, etc.) He said it wasn’t a fisher cat. His description is “golden retriever size, but with a lot of weight to it, color blackish brown, arched back, 6 inch bushy tail. It didn’t look like a bear or dog, but somewhere in between.”
I found this article. It’s an op-ed piece published before the report referenced above confirming one particular “beast” as “fido”.
http://www.sunjournal.com/opinion/20060827155.php
This one particular excerpt below is interesting in that the descriptions are really similar to the account describing the mysterious animal sighted just down the road from us.
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“June Stevens of Greene reported such an encounter in 2004. Driving onto her property in the middle of the afternoon, she saw a strange animal behind an outbuilding. “It appeared larger than a dog, had a bristly looking coat, sort of a mottle gray and black. It was not a bit timid, started right at us.” It frightened her dog so much, she quickly drove into the garage and shut the door.
Also in 2004, Leo Doyon described his uneasy encounter with an unidentifiable animal in Auburn. He saw the animal while on his deck and, despite years of hunting in the Maine woods, had never seen such a creature. “It was no wolf. It sure as hell wasn’t a fisher and it wasn’t a coy dog,” he said. “To tell you the truth, I don’t know what it was.”
Sightings of similar animals have been reported in Wales, Litchfield, Sabattus, Turner, Lewiston and Auburn, with many of the reports describing a hyena-like animal.
In Wales, such an animal killed Leo Michaud’s 16-year-old Doberman pinscher. At the time, Michaud described the attack as savage. The dog’s head was ripped open and her neck appeared to have been chewed.
After his dog was killed, Michaud found a den near the doghouse, which was just 40 yards from the entrance to the Oak Hill High School campus. And, nights later, he saw the creature in the yard. It was, he said, a large animal, black, gray and brown with wild eyes and a bushy tail.
Like Doyon, Michaud has hunted in Maine for decades. “I’ve spent a lot of time in the woods,” he said, and “I’ve never seen anything that looks like this.”
While there was some speculation the animal was a wolverine, Maj. Thomas Santaguida of the Maine Warden Service guessed it was a fisher, an animal similar in size and shape to a wolverine, but much more aggressive and mean. These animals can, Santaguida said, “live very nearby without people even knowing it,” suggesting that people might be surprised to know how prevalent they are in the wild.
Other experts believe these sightings are probably variously colored coyotes with mange. Trapper Cindy Johnson told the Sun Journal, if a coyote starts losing its hair from mange, “they may drag their rear end when they walk. It will look odd,” she said, and may explain the hyena-like appearance”