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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