"They Actually Eat That:" Porcupine.

Is there any vertebrate that sounds less appetizing than porcupine? It's big, and there's a lot of meat there, but it has spines, teeth, and claws to deal with. Granted, boars and bulls can be pretty nasty, but their skin won't turn your face into a bloody mess (plus, bacon). Who looks at a porcupine and goes "yeah, that looks delicious?" Well...a fair amount of people, actually.

Wherever there are porcupines, people will eat them. They usually do not want to, though. Native Americans can and will use porcupines as meat during the winter. Kenya had a porcupine crisis in 2005 - the most logical solution, after the porcupines had dug up graves and destroyed crops, was to eat the buggers. This may have been dirty porcupine meat, but there is no greater revenge than eating the ones who ate your food.

Porcupine meat is not just for the non-industrialized, either. Porcupines are assholes, for lack of a better word, on a regular basis. They carry diseases, nibble on everything, stick you or others with their hair-turned-needles, and generally are just unpleasant to have around. Last year, people in Pennsylvania started eating porcupines, too- or at least made hunting them legal in the wake of a porcupine outbreak. Again, revenge.

The practice of eating porcupine is still largely reserved for Native Americans and people with porcupine issues in the West, but China and Vietnam at porcupine regularly. It is so popular over there that porcupines are actually threatened. We knew that Vietnam and China ate almost anything. It seemed unlikely that they would hunt a rodent enough to cause a population decrease of 20 percent. Revenge? Noooo, this is just how Southeast Asia rolls. They even farm porcupines.

So how does it taste? Supposedly...weirdly good. It has been described as being "like duck meat, but with more flavour and very crunchy." That particular person actually liked it better than duck; given what I've seen from people's reactions to duck, that is quite the compliment. Maybe the Vietnamese are onto something.

Creature Feature: Bigfoot Porcupines.

In the vein of speculation about the new Grass-type starter, "porcupine" has come up repeatedly. The idea of getting a massive porcupine as a starter brought to mind a certain "Bigfoot" video that was debunked in a flash. We already had a yeti Pokemon; a porcupine becoming Bigfoot would not be out of the question. I doubt Game Freak will be that creative, but just in case, the stuff connecting porcupines and Bigfoot is pretty crazy anyways.


Late last year, this video was blogged by an ardent cryptozoologist. Unfortunately, not only was it a year or two too late, but the video had been debunked. Not "no way, you're avoiding the truth!" debunked, but legitimately, "OK, yeah, our bad" debunked. It continues to fool people today regardless. So, what was it, really?

A few PhotoShops and de-fuzzes later, "Bigfoot" was revealed to be a rather large North American Porcupine. For those of you who are secretly mole people, porcupines are spiny rodents native to virtually every landmass except Australia and Antarctica. They are herbivores, but are armed with spiny hairs ("quills") which they do not shoot, merely bristle whenever a predator approaches. They are also fairly large, third only to the beaver and capybara in size.

It turns out porcupines can look an awful lot like large primates when they want to. The first instinct of a porcupine is not to turn buttwards towards a mouth of teeth; they would rather run than fight, and resemble rather large, furry, short-tailed monkeys when they climb away from predators. Giant, short-tailed thing? Clearly Bigfoot.

One of the craziest conspiracy theories has a basis in fact: that porcupines may be hiding Bigfoot bones. Macabre as it sounds, porcupines do indeed hoard bones. Bones are the rodent version of vitamin tablets. If a porcupine finds a bone, it may well chew on it in order to gain phosphorous.  Whether Bigfoot wound up in there and absolutely nowhere else or not is another matter entirely. I would suspect the men in black before a porcupine conspiracy.

...

You didn't see anything.