The Book of Animal Ignorance Read Free Page B

sausage and looks like a furry prawn. The Screaming Hairy ( Chaetophractus vellerosus ) armadillo squeals like a pig when disturbed, though this seldom happens: it spends seventeen hours a day asleep and often won’t wake even if you pick it up or hit it with a broom.
    During the Great Depression in 1930s America, hungry people resorted to baking armadillos. They were nicknamed ‘Hoover Hogs’ as a dig at President Herbert Hoover .
    The Giant armadillo ( Priodontes maximus ) weighs up to 135 lb (heavier than most Texan cheerleaders), sports lethal 9-inch claws and has the largest number of teeth of any mammal: a hundred tubular pegs that never stop growing. The Three-banded armadillo ( Tolypeutes tricinctus ) is the only one that can roll into a ball.

    Nine-banded armadillos (despite the handicap of having wedding-tackle big enough to scratch their own chin with) are strong swimmers. They swam the Rio Grande in 1850 and spread to most of the southern United States wherethere are now between thirty and fifty million of them.
    They have two ways of getting across rivers. Their bony armour means they naturally sink, so they can just stroll along the bottom, holding their breath for up to six minutes. If they need a longer swim, they gulp down air and inflate their stomachs into life-jackets.
    The poet Dante Gabriel Rossetti kept a pair of armadillos as pets in his back garden in Chelsea. One of them burrowed its way into his neighbour’s kitchen – its head appeared from under a hearthstone and convinced the cook that she had been visited by the Devil .
    Males mark their territory with urine and their smell has been likened to that of an elderly blue cheese. To avoid giving birth in the winter, females can hang on to a fertilised egg for up to two years.
    Other than humans and mice, Nine-banded armadillos are the only animals seriously afflicted by leprosy: most armadillos in Louisiana are lepers.

    In next-door Texas, armadillos are one of two state mammals – the other is the Texas longhorn. They’ve also been nicknamed the ‘Texan speed bump’. Their singularly ineffective defence mechanism is to leap several feet in the air when startled: Texan highways are littered with them.
    As a result, armadillos lead the world in research into the function of the mammalian penis. The members of dead armadillos are regularly harvested from road-kill – a job made easier by the fact that they are so gigantic.
    Armadillos have been around for sixty million years: they are almost as old as the dinosaurs. In Bolivia and Peru, their shells are made into mandolins called charangos in imitation of Spanish guitars. They are then fitted with ten strings, generally tuned to A minor – a sad and noble key.

Badger
    Woodland aristocrats
    T he parallels with the British upper classes are striking: badgers are stubborn creatures of habit; some of their setts, and the paths or ‘runs’ that lead to them, are centuries old, handed down from generation to generation like stately homes. The largest sett ever found was a veritable Blenheim Palace with more than 130 entrances, fifty rooms and half a mile of tunnels. Seventy tons of earth had been moved to make it. Most setts house a group of up to twenty adult badgers, known as a ‘clan’, and they will spend half their lives inside it, fast asleep.
    BADGER HALL
    Badgers are members of the Mustelid family, closely related to weasels and otters. ‘Mustelid’ comes from the Latin for weasel, mustela , itself from the word for, mouse, but badgers mostly feed on juicy earthworms, and very rarely need to drink as a result. If pushed, they will eat mice, as well as rats, toads, wasps, beetles, hedgehogs and even cereal crops.
    Their stripe lets other species know that they are strong, fierce and ready to defend themselves. To communicate with their clan they produce astrong ‘musk’ from glands under their tails. This is used for marking