Bigfoot, real or not, is the undisputed king of America's reported unknown animals, aka "cryptids." Since the filmed encounter from California in 1967 (strongly argued to be a hoax, but from a public interest point of view, it almost doesn't matter), nothing reported in North America has consumed more ink, videotape, and RAM than the big guy. The chupacabra mythos carved out a niche, and the lake monsters like Champ and Ogopogo haven't gone away (assuming they were there), but cryptozoologists and lovers of the unknown are focused overwhelmingly on Sasquatch.
Enter the Dogman. This alleged denizen of the north-central U.S., especially the woods of Michigan and Wisconsin, is not going to knock Bigfoot off his tree stump, but it's the first cryptid since myth and image merged after the 1995 movie Species to create the chupacabra that could take a bite out of the Bigfoot-branded pizza of popularity.
Dogman stories in Michigan have been traced as far back as 1887 (although Bigfoot fans will point out that still makes it a juvenile in cryptid terms). Something similar from Wisconsin, which hit the newspapers beginning in 1992, was known for a long time from the location of its first reports, so the Beast of Bray Road has become part of the same concept. The Dogman and similar creatures are based on dozens of reports, including some hoaxes but, as Linda Godfrey has documented, a lot from sincere people, some of them flat-out scared by the encounter.
Physically, one can think of the Dogman as a very large werewolf that never goes back to human. It's not claimed to transform into anything, although running on all fours has been reported. Running like a wolf seems to be part-time, though: Dogman is very much a habitual biped, often over 2m tall.
The legend really took off with Linda Godfrey's 2003 book The Beast of Bray Road: Tailing Wisconsin's Werewolf.
The Beast got more popular with the release of its "based on actual events" movie in 2005. (As B-horror films go, it wasn't bad at all.)
Godfrey certainly thinks there is somethign worth looking into, as she has produced another book on the creature, Real Wolfmen: True Encounters in Modern America, and two broader books on monsters. Overall, her books are too credulous for my taste, but American Monsters and Monsters Among Us collect a lot of interesting critter reports I'd not read before, so they are at the least fun reading. You can check out her website at http://www.beastofbrayroad.com. The Bray Road Beast has at least one other website, one that suggests reports have nearly ceased and the creature behind them has moved on.
My favorite fictional universe, Jim Butcher's Dresden Files, got in on the act in 2018 with a graphic novel, Dog Men. Butcher's wizard Harry Dresden hears of an attack by one (in Mississippi, where I don't think they've ever been reported, but we're already into wizards and magic, so ok) and assumes they are werewolves. Native American wizard Listens-to-Wind explains the "wolf people" have always been there and are intelligent flesh-and-blood creatures, not magical (although they seem able to sense magic, and they really, really hate ghouls). Given Butcher's large nationwide readership, this will no doubt give the cryptid's popularity another boost.
Is there a huge bipedal creature with dog ancestry? No.
Canid bodies are wholly unsuited to bipedalism: trained show dogs are impressive but clearly unnatural and can't maintain a two-pawed walk for any longer than it takes to hold a stage act on largely flat surfaces. A line of evolution from known canids to a bipedal creature is, by itself, not a crazy idea, but it would have to be a long line, with changes taking hundreds of thousands of years at least if humans are any guide. We don't have a scrap or trace of fossils of all this. Some cryptozoologists suggest the reports are mistaken sightings of Bigfoot, but then you have the same problem, once removed as it were. Leading cryptozoologist Loren Coleman suggested a link to the cryptid known as the shunka-warak'in (think of a wolf on steroids), but that hasn't been established either (although it intrigues me, something other American land cryptids generally don't).
So to me, the Dogman and his ilk are a modern American myth, the latest to emerge on a nationwide stage in a nation that has always loved monsters in folklore, film, and literature. As with Bigfoot, it is more likely sincere witnesses are mistaken than that something looking like a wolfman exists. (Bigfoot is on a bit better ground here, since we know there are large bipedal primates (us)). So enjoy. Just don't tell me the Dogman exists unless you've got one on a leash.
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