The vampire's relationship to the animal kingdom is manifested in its ability to achieve transformation into various animal shapes; its command over the animal kingdom, especially the rat, the owl, the bat, the moth, the fox, and the wolf; and to a lesser extent its prey upon animals for food. Also, on rare occasions, animal vampires have been reported.
Animals in Vampire Folklore: In the older folklore, the vampire's command of animals or the ability to transform into animals was a minimal element at best. However, the vampire was often associated with other creatures, such as werewolves, who were defined by their ability to transform themselves. Among the vampires who did change into animals were the chiang-shih vampires of China who could transform into wolves.
More importantly, the vampire, especially in Western Europe, saw the animal world as a food supply and would often attack the village's cattle herd and suck the animals' blood. Sudden, unexpected, and unexplained deaths of cattle would often be attributed to vampires. For example, Agnes Murgoci noted that one of the first tests in determining if a recently deceased man had become a vampire would be the sudden death of his livestock. Sir James Frazer observed that in Bulgaria , where the cattle suffered from frequent vampire attacks, people treated such attacks by having their herds pass between two bonfires constructed at a nearby crossroads known to be frequented by wolves. Afterward, the coals from the bonfires were used to relight the fires in the village. In Japan , the vampire kappa lived at the water's edge and would attack cows and horses and try to drag them into the water.
A few animals, particularly cats and horses, were also believed to have a special relationship to vampires. It was thought in many Eastern European countries that if one allowed an animal such as a cat to jump over the corpse of a dead person prior to burial, the person would return as a vampire. (This belief emphasized the necessity of the deceased's loved ones to properly mourn, prepare, and care for the body.) The horse, on the other hand, was frequently used to locate a vampire. Brought to the graveyard, the horse would be led around various graves in the belief that it would hesitate and refuse to cross over the body of a vampire.
Dracula's Animals: Dracula's command of the animal kingdom appeared quite early in
Abraham Van Helsing warned the men who would finally track Dracula and kill him that Dracula could not only alter the weather, but that he also could "command the meaner things; the rat, and the owl, and the bat-the moth, and the fox, and the wolf." The men discovered the truth of his words for themselves when they broke into Dracula's residence, Carfax, and were suddenly set upon by thousands of rats.
Transformation: Stoker first hinted at Dracula's ability to transform himself into animal form when the imprisoned Harker looked out of his window to see Dracula crawling down the castle wall. "What manner of man is this, or what manner of creature is it in the semblance of man?" Harker wondered (chapter 3). Dracula traveled to England aboard a ship, the Demeter, which he caused to be wrecked upon the shore at Whitby. Dracula escaped the wreckage in the form of a dog. Through the rest of the novel Dracula made few appearances, however, he constantly hovered in the background in the form of a bat. Observed outside of R. N. Renfield's window at the asylum, Dr John Seward noted the strange behavior of a large bat. "Bats usually wheel and flit about, but this one seemed to go straight on, as if it knew where it was bound for or had some intention of its own" (chapter 11).
Stoker's characters were, of course, familiar with the vampire bats of Central and South America and understood the vampire's close association with the bat. At one point Seward examined one of the children bitten by Lucy who had been admitted to a hospital. The doctor attending the boy hypothesized that the wounds on his neck were caused by a bat. "'Out of so many harmless ones,' he said, `there may be some wild specimen from the south of a more malignant species. Some sailor may have brought one home, and it managed to escape; or even from some Zoological Gardens a young one may have got loose, or one be bred there from a vampire'" (chapter 15).
Animals and the Contemporary Vampire Myth: While there has been, as a whole, less attention paid to animals in the Dracula movies and stage plays, the command of animals is an essential element in the alteration of the plot in the first of the Dracula movies, Nosferatu Eine Symphonie des Garuens Building upon Dracula's command of the rats that so bedeviled Van Helsing and the men as they entered Carfax, Graf Orlock, the Dracula character in Nosferatu commanded plague-bearing rats. He arrived at Bremen with the rats, and the pestilence that accompanied them was a sign of the vampire's presence. The death of the vampire brought an end to the plague.
The vampire's ability to transform into different forms, especially that of a bat, has remained an essential element to most modern vampire movies and novels. The improvement of special effects in movies has allowed for more lifelike transformations to be depicted. Special effects in the recent Bram Stoker's Dracula were among the movie's more impressive features. There has been a noticeable trend, however, to strip the vampire of its less believable qualities. Both Anne Rice and Chelsea Quinn Yarbro, for example, have denied their vampires the ability to transform themselves out of human shape, though they retain other supernatural abilities.
During the last generation, as the vampire became the hero or at least the sympathetic figure with whom the reader identified, the question of the vampire feeding off of humans rose to the fore. If a vampire renounces the taking of blood from human victims, there are few nutritional options remaining: purchasing blood from various sources, finding willing donors, artificial blood substitutes, or animals. Animals were the most frequently chosen objects, and novels frequently include reflections on the adequacy of animal blood. In Rice's Interview with the Vampire, Louis was unable to bring himself to attack a human for the first four years of his vampiric existence and lived off the blood of rats and other animals.
Animal Vampires: On occasion, quite apart from stories of vampires changing into animal forms, stories of vampire animals have surfaced. As early as 1810, stories came from the borderland between England and Scotland of sheep, sometimes as many as 10 a night, having their jugular vein cut and their blood drained. The best known incident of a similar occurrence, reported by Charles Fort, concerned a rash of sheep killings near Caven, Ireland , in 1874. Some 42 instances of sheep having their throats cut and blood drained (but no flesh consumed) had been noted. Near the dead sheep, footprints of a dog-like animal were found. Finally a dog, seemingly the offending animal, was shot. At that point the affair should have ended. However, the sheep kept dying and more dogs were shot. Then reports began to come in from Limerick, more than 100 miles away. Accounts ended in both communities without any final resolution. In 1905, a similar spat of sheep killings occurred in England near Badminton in Gloucester. Such incidents have become part of the UFO lore of the last generation in North America. Another famous event involving possible animal vampires was the cutting of the throat of Snippy the horse in Colorado in September 1967.
Several novels have featured animal vampires, the most famous being Ken Johnson's Hounds of Dracula (1977, also released as Dracula's Dog) that was made into the movie, Zoltan: Hound of Dracula. Youthful vampire readers may be familiar with the vampire rabbit Bunnicula, the subject of several books by James Howe and Deborah Howe, and the vampire duck, Count Duckula, star of an animated television series and a Marvel comic book . Both Bunnicula and Count Duckula were vegetarians.
Fort, Charles. Lo!. London: V. Gollancz, 1931. 351 pp. Reprint. New York: Ace Books, 1931, 1941. Keel, John A. Strange Creatures from Time and Space. Greenwich, CT: Fawcett Publications, 1970. 288 pp.
