James M. Redwine

Armadillo

Not the Valkyries

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Armadillo with textured shell and long tail sniffing leaves on forest floor
A generated armadillo searches for food among leaves on the forest floor

Peg and I returned to our log cabin on our ranch and saw three large vultures just outside our front door vying over the carcass of a massive armadillo. They were so intent on rendering their share of the bounty they did not fly away until I got of our vehicle. My first impression was of President Trump, Prime Minister Netanyahu and some Ayatollah gnawing at the remains of Iran.

Armadillos are about as ugly a creature as nature has produced. They remind one of what a Congressional Committee might have produced had some generous pork producer asked their favorite House Member lackey to come up with a substitute for a hog to sell to the government for C-Rations. An armadillo is without any redeeming aesthetic value. They look the same from the front as the back; long, scaley and nasty grey from end to end with tuffs of hair dotted around for enhancement must be what other armadillos consider attractive.

Such attractiveness must work for them as the population of armadillos is growing exponentially as proven by all the dead ones on our roads. And for some reason, the Congressman who designed the armadillo provided that each pregnant female gutter-rat can produce four offspring at a time. It is as though the Armadillo Design Committee wanted to assure America has an alternate national symbol that is to the bald eagle as the U.S. Department of Transportation is to Roman highways. That is, roads that are built with planned obsolescence in mind versus two-thousand years of service.

Anyway, as I exited our pickup Peg screeched, “Jim, those vultures may attack you! That thing may still be alive.” We have plenty of experience with vultures, so I was fairly confident the already wafting putridness from the truly dead beast was what drew in the prairie vacuum sweepers.

I grabbed a pair of gloves and lifted the armadillo by its hairless, scaley tail. I was surprised at how heavy it was. It must have been a very pregnant female before somebody on the nearest state highway, two miles away, had run over it. I estimate it weighed twenty pounds based on my previous armadillo experience. I carried it out into the pasture and made sure it was visible from the sky. The vultures only waited about twenty minutes before hovering around the reeking mess. The pasture was armadillo-free by the next afternoon.

I wish to commend the vultures for somehow transporting the heavy helping of armadillo from what, I assume, was a two-mile flight. It looked like they had clung to their prize as long as they could before having to release it onto our lane. Mother Nature surely knows what She is doing even if our Congressional Committees do not. Vaya con dios mama armadillo, feel free to never return.

By the way, I do have a friend who swears the meat of an armadillo tastes like “sweet pork”. As I told him, he has my blessing to collect every dead armadillo he finds on the highway and serve them at Easter. He will have no competition from Peg and me, and that is even without the leprosy factor.

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An Armadillo Ranch?

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On Sunday, September 18, 2023 some person or persons cut through the wire cages of a mink farm in Pennsylvania and released six to eight thousand minks that were bred for their fur. It is assumed animal rights activists freed the mink and released them upon the surrounding human populace who are being cautioned to not approach any escaped mink they may encounter as the animals are definitely not cuddly and they have no edible value.

This event has exacerbated the ongoing debate between friends of the animal world, who probably cannot afford mink coats, and entrepreneurs and rich people. One objection from the Free Mink Now crowd is the mink are slaughtered just for their pelts; their flesh does not appear on the dinner plates of people sporting the fur. Unlike cattle that provide food and whose hides are put to innumerable uses or hogs that provide bacon and whose hides provide footballs, mink are raised solely to be skinned. Perhaps if mink farmers could switch to some animal whose value did not lie in its outer covering alone, the environmentalists might not be so militant.

Such a prospect came to mind when I discovered multiple armadillo holes in Peg’s flower beds. What if instead of running over them on our roads or seeing them lying on their backs with their four paws sticking up in the air surrounding an empty beer can, we started ranching armadillos for sale? There would be many advantages over raising cattle or hogs. First of all, they are everywhere and they are free. They appear wherever insects and grubs appear and they feed and water themselves. It is true that the fences would need to be extended down about five feet and barbed wire will not hold them. But with a few solid pine slats they could be penned in. After all, they are as nearsighted as Mr. Magoo and only move about five miles per hour. They should be easy to recapture even if they escape.

And in some countries people hunt armadillos for food. One of my friends from Mexico got upset with me when I told him I had shot an armadillo that was digging up one of Peg’s flower beds. My friend told me his family like the meat and that those old wives tales about leprosy were greatly exaggerated. His stance reminded me of my dear departed father who grew up so poor his family ate practically anything, squirrels, opossums, raccoons you name it. If it moved, they ate it. If it didn’t, they used it for fertilizer.

So, I suggest we start a new agricultural industry based on armadillo scales. Forget mink. We could even call upon fancy French clothes designers to dress those stick-like models on the red carpet with armadillo “fur”. It could be the new rayon or plastic type covering. They could sell it as “Putting on one’s armor of righteousness” or whatever the patrons of Hobby Lobby are comfortable with.