Night Stalkers: Villagers are Hunting for Packs of Wild Vampire Dogs In Indonesia

This article originally appeared on VICE Indonesia.

This article has been updated to reflect the latest cases of livestock mass killings.

A number of Indonesian villages are now suffering from vampire-like attacks on their livestock. Farmers across East Java and Bali have found their goats killed by a blow to the abdomen or a bite on the neck by an unknown creature.

“The attacks happen at night. It seems like a dog did it, but I’m not sure,” Saiful, a villager who like many Indonesians goes by only one name, told local media. His goats were safe from the attacks that took place in July 2019 in his home village of Sumberrejo.

A nearly identical incident took place in the Village of Jula, Bali three days after the Sumberrejo attacks, where the village’s livestock–mostly goats and cows–died of a laceration to their stomachs. Villagers thought the perpetrator to be supernatural because the animals’ wounds were about the size of a human hand, making it unlikely that dogs are responsible.

Wayan Baru, a Balinese farmer whose cows were murdered by laceration to the abdomen, believes black magic was at play. “Some villagers said they saw a creature with the head of a dog and the body of a human,” he told local media.

This series of events in Bali and East Java reminded residents of a similarly mysterious mass livestock killing in 2017 in Purwodadi village, Mount Kidul, where 50 goats were killed in a week. Their blood was drained from a bite to their necks; local officials also suspected wild dogs were to blame. But the fact that the creature that killed them was after blood, not meat, put villagers on edge.

So what's going on here? One local agricultural agency official told the press that it was likely the work of packs of wild dogs. The official, a man named Suseno Budi, said that wild dogs lived in caves up in the mountains and, thirsty from the region's ongoing drought, they were wandering down to the villages to drink the blood of goats. It's a pretty weird theory, but Suseno stood by it, explaining that the same thing happened last year.

At the time, much of Central Java and Yogyakarta had been struggling through one of the worst droughts in years. Wells were running dry, bottled water prices were skyrocketing, and regional officials were rushing to aid the estimated 1.4 million people left high and dry by the drought. In Gunung Kidul alone more than 45,000 people lacked access to clean drinking water.

Drought has come and gone in the Mount Kidul region, but worsened in the past few years. Since July 2017, over 45,000 people living in the area have struggled to obtain water for daily use and the price of mineral water in the region skyrocketed. The regional government believes the drought will affect up to 1.4 million people. If water is difficult to come by for humans, then it must be even more difficult for animals.

The drought and allegations of packs of wild blood-sucking dogs highlight a growing problem in Indonesia—the impact of human development on the nation's varied wildlife. In nearby Boyolali district, local authorities have hired sharpshooters to combat the gangs of wild monkeys that are stealing food and attacking villagers. Local officials there blamed the drought as well, arguing that the monkeys were raiding nearby villages for food after extremely dry conditions decimated food stocks in their natural habitat.

But another reason behind all of these attacks is the fact that human settlements are increasingly encroaching into what remains of Indonesia's forests. When a man was found inside the belly of a giant python last March, the shocking video quickly grabbed headlines around the world. But that death only happened because an oil palm plantation had spread into what was once forested landin West Sulawesi.

Yet, it's a lot easier to blame the whole thing on rotten animals than human development. So while the drought and encroachment are likely behind these livestock deaths, the region's dogs are going to pay the price. Local villagers are organizing night patrols and wild dog hunts to protect their animals. And the vampires? Who knows.