What is a Dogman?

I know I've mentioned a couple times that apparently dogman doesn't appear in the fossil record. We've kicked around a number of pretty wild ideas about why that might be. Well, lately I've been reading; Understanding Earth's deep past, which deals with very long term climatological cycles and has nothing to do with cryptids, but it got me thinking.

As far as I understand it the planet's been in a "cold" phase for about the last 30 million years, but for most of the last 600 million years it was in a "warm" phase similar to the global warming cycle occurring currently. Along with deteriorated polar ice and sea level rise, It's pretty clear that these deep time climate changes significantly impacted the biosphere as well.

One thing that has puzzled me is the number of dogman encounters that take place in, or in close proximity, to bodies of water. Initially I reasoned that it was likely because water is so critical to life, but the number still seemed disproportionately high considering canids aren't adapted for long periods of immersion.

I'm wondering now if dogman possibly corresponds to increased surface temperature. It seems reasonable that a species which propagates in higher temperatures would instinctively use water to regulate body temperature, particularly a canid species, since they lack sweat glands and thus that mechanism for controlling body temperature.

If their appearance is closely tied to such deep time climate cycles this would mark the first period in which they co-existed with man, and also explain their absence from the fossil record.

Those ideas make sense. 

I have had a 'feeling' (that and a quarter won't buy a cup of coffee, lol) that there may be a correlation between the missing and cryptids like dogman and bigfoot.  That's just a hunch, nothing more on my part. 

I appreciate the sharing of ideas. and your logic is as sound as anything else we've seen/heard.  Interesting ideas.

This place is like a ghost town.  Thanks for contributing.

AG47, No need for thanks. This board gives me an opportunity to express ideas and sometimes writing them down helps me work through them.

Wolfhound, Thanks for the anecdote about the kangaroos. Without a better working hypothesis, I think the most reasonable way to approach the dogman phenomenon is as a biological entity.


One of the points I wanted to make was that we may have a related triad between dogman, missing people, and bodies of water. Most of what I wrote was a mental exercise exploring that. A useful next step would be researching overlap between the missing 411 clusters and locations of dogman sightings, if a correlation presents itself it should be quite easy to determine if a body of water was a possible third factor.

I don't have access to a cluster map, and honestly don't have enough time to devote to it, but if anyone's inclined to look into it I would be very interested in the results.

On a side note, I think in the beginning there were people posting here who were taking a much less critical viewpoint. I doubt they want anything to do with the open-minded skeptical vein this thread is running in. I probably bear some responsibility having debunked a youtube video and questioned the validity of a photographed set of tracks. I've also made it clear that I'm willing to consider the possibility that dogman doesn't exist at all if that's where the evidence eventually leads.

There are people who firmly believe in dogman for no other reason than they want to. I don't begrudge them the freedom to believe whatever they want, but past experience has taught me that people who ardently believe something without supporting empirical evidence tend to become very defensive when their beliefs are disagreed with.

Sorry it's been awhile since I posted. As you may know, I'm engaged in several ongoing studies/ projects. On top of those I also do some free-lance writing. My most recent piece appears in the Nov/ Dec issue of The Backwoodsman magazine, and I almost always have a manuscript in the drafting process.

I haven't seen the NADP video, but I did see the Missing 411 movie. For me the most interesting part was listening to what Les Stroud had to say. In my opinion he is the most genuinely skilled and experienced "expert" seen on TV, so when he observed that a case did not have the hallmarks of an animal attack I think it's reasonable to assume that something out of the ordinary occurred.

While I'm not implying a connection to Dogman here, there simply isn't enough evidence to support that, The film reminded me of other cases discussed in interviews with Dave Paulides where the remains were found inexplicably far from the point last seen. As mentioned in the film, it would be perfectly normal for a predator such as a bear, wolf, or large cat to carry prey away from an area suddenly inundated with search teams, but the distances traveled seem too great for a known predator.

In these instances I think a better case could be made for predation by a creature with characteristics nearly always attributed to Dogman, particularly speed (quickly travelling long distances),and intelligence (lack of physical evidence between point last seen and remains found).

By all means share your thoughts.

Hello AG47,

You're right, it is like a ghost town here. That's probably because you and I have an unpopular viewpoint that doesn't favor either utter skepticism or complete acceptance. I think most people with interest in the subject fall into one extreme or the other and feel they have to defend their position. Our dialogue here could easily be misconstrued as an attack by either side, even though we're just trying to work through the question asked by the thread's title. It looks like we've inadvertently discouraged some folks from contributing. For my part that wasn't intentional, but I'm also not going to let an outlandish, physics denying claim go unchallenged. If the truth turns out to, in fact, disprove a law of physics I'm fine with that, but we have to get there by investigating empirical evidence. Scary campfire stories are fun, but genuinely trying to solve a mystery is much more interesting to me.

For what it's worth, Bonnie Korniak has me on the list of field investigators here in Florida. We talked months ago and the only report she'd worked on was pretty clearly a coyote (she shared the file in order to get my opinion). Since then she hasn't contacted me with any reported encounters. So currently there's not much going on in the field either as far as I know, at least down here.

Thought some of you might find this interesting. When the group of photos is shown, pay attention to the lower, center one as it contains an adult person for scale.

It occurred to me that even with four decades of outdoors experience and the psychological comfort of a familiar, capable sidearm at hand, if I were to observe a wolf of this size very briefly or in other non-ideal circumstances (e.g. low light, brush) it would be challenging to identify it correctly.

Note: I'm not saying this to claim any sort of deep woods mastery, only to relate that I have spent a more than average amount of time engaged in outdoor activities and to express my opinion that it would be even more easily misidentified by less experienced Outdoorsmen.

youtu.be/IhznHWbD1F0