How do you pick up a porcupine? | ECOVIEWS
At age 3, my grandson Nicholas asked me, "Grandpa, how do you pick up a porcupine?" Oh my, I thought at the time, I wonder why he wants to know. The reasons not to pick up a porcupine clearly outweigh the reasons to do so. Nonetheless, I told him I would check with porcupine authorities and find out the answer to his question. Turns out, opinions on the best approach vary among the experts.
Porcupines can fill an attacker’s body part with sharp-pointed quills in the blink of an eye. This most often happens when the porcupine slaps an attacker with its tail and the needlelike barbs either protrude like spires or penetrate the skin.
Removing a protruding quill can be painful. Even more painful to extract is a quill that penetrates the skin and ratchets along beneath it. One may, however, acquire a quill as a souvenir without being slapped by one of these prickly rodents. In an encounter with a porcupine in Wyoming, I teased it with a heavy wool coat until it slapped the coat with its tail, leaving several quills for me to take home. Other than that, I knew little about the natural history of porcupines and nothing about how to pick one up by hand.
Uldis Roze, professor emeritus at Queens College, City University of New York, and the quintessential expert on porcupines, has had a wealth of experience with these intriguing animals. Two of his books, “The North American Porcupine, Second edition (Cornell University Press; 2009) and "Porcupines: The Animal Answer Guide" (Johns Hopkins University Press; 2012), provide the curious layperson with all they need to know about these overzealous acupuncturists. I asked Uldis to confirm what I had learned from another expert about the best way to pick up a porcupine.
I’m pretty sure that for most people that expert’s description will qualify as one of those do-not-try-this-at-home scenarios. Nonetheless, these are the step-by-step instructions for how one expert picks up a porcupine. A well-kept secret is that the underside of a porcupine’s tail has no quills, only bristly hairs. The first step is to get the porcupine cornered against a bush or wall. Then use a stick to tap on the animal’s back. Its response will be to slap the stick with its tail, at which point the person moves a hand to the ground (presumably with lightninglike speed) so that the inoffensive lower side of the tail lands on the open hand when the tail comes back down. Moving the hand slightly backward with the grain of the quills, grab the porcupine around the tail and pick it up, holding it away from your body.
And there you have it, the how-to for picking up porcupines. But wait! When I asked Uldis about the “grab them by the bottom of the tail” school of picking up porcupines, he said he had tried that technique. His experience led to a different opinion about its effectiveness.
A few years ago, he “tried the tail-catch method on a porcupine in the Catskills.” As he discovered, “not everyone is successful” at it. He ended up with a quill under the skin in his arm that caused “unbearable pain” and his “right arm felt paralyzed.”
He has, understandably, developed his own technique for catching a porcupine. He uses an Igloo cooler, which he considers to be the “perfect tool.” He instructs the would-be hunter to “walk up to the porcupine, Igloo open and pointing downward.” Like skunks, porcupines have great confidence in their defensive abilities and seldom try to run.
“Push the Igloo over the porcupine and close the top. The key to the Igloo’s success is that it immobilizes the tail. He further notes the importance of wearing a “porcupine glove (Naugahyde, not leather).” Porcupine quills will pierce most leather gloves and pin them to your hand.
After careful consideration, Nicholas decided he would leave catching porcupines to others. I heartily supported this decision.
Whit Gibbons is professor of zoology and senior biologist at the University of Georgia’s Savannah River Ecology Laboratory. If you have an environmental question or comment, email ecoviews@gmail.com.
This article originally appeared on The Tuscaloosa News: How do you pick up a porcupine? | ECOVIEWS
