Friday, October 3, 2008

New Animal Information

I am really busy right now trying to graduate, and also undergoing a psychological process that appears to be the result of the end of graduate school and entails a) my brain really not working well and me being confused a lot, and b) the receeding of the mean and paranoid part of my personality--but, BUT--I am not too busy to have discovered the world's largest rodent (average weight 100 lbs!) living a mile from my new apartment!

It lives in the little zoo in the park! I was running in the park and I saw some of them. They make lots of different noises, including whistling and snorting.

CC told her family about this and they suggested that non-Western people eat the world's largest rodent. I told my sister and she said she heard on the radio that when Europeans first saw the world's largest rodent in South America, they wrote to the Pope to ask him to identify it. They wrote a description of it, including that it swims. The Pope wrote back and identified that it was a fish.



Image courtsey of Home of the World's Largest Rodent. Person pictured is a trained zoo professional: do not attempt.


8 comments:

Could-be-a-model said...

How do these compare with the rats in The Princess Bride?

Kid Showbusiness said...

I don't think those rats claimed to be the largest rodents on the planet. I may not recall correctly, but I thought that they were "merely" rodents of unusual size. So, unusually big, yes. But, the biggest of all? Bigger than all rodents everywhere? No.

CheeseQuest said...

vgirl was having a debate with her gf at one point over whether capybaras are fast. maybe you can settle this?

Vgirl said...

You'll recall this post: http://vgirlphotoblog.blogspot.com/2008/02/capybarakapiva.html
In which I try to distinguish if they are slow or not slow. Now you are in close enough range to actually verify my hypothesis. YSA, you are who I am now counting on to prove once and for all that Capybara are not slow!

MasterGote said...

Well, the Home of the World's Largest Rodent's artistically blurry shots of the capybaras running suggest that the world's largest rodent is indeed fast.

Also, I wish the internet would tell more stories using pictures. More pictures, internet!

CheeseQuest said...

I want to know why I can't hug a capybara too!

Tom said...

Wikipedia says you can! "Capybaras are gentle and will usually allow humans to pet and hand-feed them."

These things don't actually seem that special. On the wacky animal scale they rank pretty low.

your small american said...

You guys, I will totally get on top of this situation. I will return to the zoo to investigate. Just like I successfully investigated the racist Dutch Santa. Preliminary investigation of WLR: I learned on Yahoo answers that they do not make good pets.