Is it a monster from the deep, or is it a luckless large farm animal?

For Westshore man Jim Diggle, the origins of a carcass found on the nearby Westshore Beach late on Saturday morning remained a mystery 24 hours after he first blinked his eyes, thinking he was looking at a hippo.

“It’s a monster” and “bigger than anything I’ve ever seen”, but he was prepared to accept it was most likely to be a farm animal such as a pig drowned in recent floods and washed downriver out to sea.

A porcine product of the sea, or a victim of the recent floods? Photo / Supplied

Found about 250m off the northern end of The Esplanade, it was about “eight feet” (2.5m) long, without its apparently-severed head and “would have to be over a tonne”, he estimated. It also appeared “hairless”.

A spokesperson from the Hawke’s Bay Regional Council, also trying to work out what happened to thousands of much small sea creatures washed ashore in recent days, conceded, after seeing pictures of the carcass, that it’s “huge,” but it hadn’t investigated the situation or been called on to remove or dispose of the carcass.

“There have been some interesting discoveries,” she said of the past week of strange things washing up.

Late on Sunday a spokesperson said the consensus is that it’s a cattle carcass, and Council’s Pollution Response team and its works group will co-ordinate removal.

But a new problem had emerged, the carcass being adjacent to a protected nesting area for New Zealand dotterels, which means the HBRC requires a “bird survey” before moving the carcass, which “likely” could not be done until Tuesday.