ARMADILLOS

The Organic Speed Bump

Armadillos live on insects and vegetation, but are not averse to stealing ground-nesting birds’ eggs. They have small, peg-like teeth unsuited for much else. They have a keep sense of hearing, but very poor eyesight. They are also very fast on their feet. The average person can’t catch one by running after it. They also have powerful claws. It takes an armadillo only a few moments to dig a hole deep enough to conceal its vulnerable head and belly. Its shell-armored body makes it invulnerable to smaller predators like bobcats, foxes, and coyotes—so long as the predator can’t get to the animal’s unarmored belly. It will also take refuge in pre-dug holes it finds. By digging the claws of all four feet into the walls of the hole, it makes itself almost impossible to pull out by the tail.

Reaching into a hole to pull an armadillo out by the tail is risky. The animal’s shell makes it virtually invulnerable to snakebite, but the hand that grabs the tail isn’t. When an armadillo takes refuge in a hole already inhabited by a rattler or a copperhead, the snake is annoyed by the intrusion. Unable to attack the intruder through the shell, it will take out its annoyance by striking the hand attempting to remove the intruder.

When caught in the open by a predator, an armadillo has a second line of defense. It relies on its hearing to identify the direction and proximity of the predator. As soon as the predator is almost atop the armadillo, the intended prey leaps straight up, sometimes as much as six feet. It lands on its feet and scoots off in a direction either opposite the approach of the predator or at right angles to it. This requires the predator to stop its rush, change direction, identify the new location of the prey, and start the chase over again.

This instinctive behavior, however, has a drawback. An armadillo can’t tell the difference between an approaching coyote and a semi-rig roaring down the highway. Millions of years of evolutionary conditioning cause it to react to the truck just as it would react to a coyote. This explains the armadillo-shaped dents in the radiator shutters of a lot of diesel rigs that frequent roads in armadillo country.

The armadillo has a third defense against predators if there is a fast-flowing stream close by. The shell’s watertight. The armadillo simply jumps into the water, rolls itself on its back, and floats away on the current.

Armadillo meat, when properly prepared, can be very tasty. To say “it tastes a lot like chicken” is perhaps too trite, but during the Great Depression in the 1930s armadillo and dumplings, prepared like chicken and dumplings, was a common dish in much of the rural South. The animals got a nickname at that time—Hoover hogs.

In the 1940s, during WWII, Afrika Korps soldiers captured in the Sahara were kept, by Geneva Conventions, at the same latitude at which they were captured. A lot of them were sent to Camp Maxey, deep in the hardwood and pine forests of East Texas, where almost-daily rain can be common in every month except August. In addition to the shock of transfer—being taken from one of the driest places on earth and placed in what is only about two steps from being a temperate rain forest—they encountered animals they’d never seen before. One of those animals was the armadillo.

The German POWs asked the prison-camp guards what the strange, shelled animals were. The guards, who had been selected from troops from New York and New Jersey—a precaution against the guards, even unintentionally, being able to give the prisoners information that might aid in an escape—had no idea what an armadillo was. They’d never seen the critters, either. The Germans gave them a name that was uniquely German and uniquely descriptive—panzerschwein. Tank pigs.