Bitten by the World's Largest Rodent

I took this picture of a group of capybaras at the National Zoo, Kuala Lumpur, September 2005.

This is another personal story, this time of an encounter with an animal. It happened when I was very young, perhaps three or four years old. My father, a paleontologist, had taken his first job after university, teaching at the University of Florida, which is in the small town of Gainesville, located in the northwestern part of the state.

We lived in a small red prefab house in the country. This was the early 1960s and my parents bought our prefab home from General Electic, which presumably wanted not only to cash in on the prefab home business, but also use it as a way to increase their sales of electrical appliances. It may have been a short-lived venture, but I remember our little house with love.

I have many happy "snapshots" in my memory from our Florida years: an outdoors that was the world's biggest sandbox; green snakes and tortoises to play with; burning blue skies; spiky, spiny plants; my sisters and I riding on Sandy, our palomino mare, as my mother led her; a pet white rabbit whose hide my mother tried to tan after it died (it came out stiff as a board); a beagle and her endless litters of puppies -- memory suggests that she gave birth to at least two sets of eleven; savage thunderstorms that knocked out the power and left us huddled next to my mother by the light of a kerosene lamp, 10% frightened, 90% thrilled. I also remember my father chopping the head off a rattlesnake near the house, then putting it into a glass jar so we could observe it up close.

I do not, however, remember the time I was bitten by a capybara (Hydrochoerus hydrochaeris). Capybaras are the world's largest rodents -- they look rather like guinea pigs on steroids -- and live in South America. They are semi-aquatic and well-adapted to the water, with their nose, eyes and ears aligned like a hippo's at the top of their skull and thus above the waterline. Capys are also excellent underwater swimmers, able to hold their breath for up to five minutes.

So how did I come to be bitten by a capybara, you may ask, without going for a swim in a body of water to the east of the Andes? I attribute it to youthful exuberance -- my parents', mine and the capybara's. We were all quite young and inexperienced, and perhaps a trifle ignorant.

It was a fad at the time, my father tells me, for the zoology students at the university to keep all sorts of exotic animals as pets. One day, one of my father's students made a buying excursion to a large animal importer in Tampa Bay and came home with a baby capybara. Somewhere between the shop and his room at the university, he realized that he had no place to keep it, so he drove to our house in the country and deposited the animal with us.

My parents gave the capybara a home in our chickenyard, which was already living quarters not only for chickens but also chicken snakes, a white rabbit and gopher tortoises who made burrows in the sand. He (or she; my parents don't recall its gender) was a young capy, perhaps only a month or two old, and barely a foot long (adult capys can be up to four feet in length). Sadly, he only stayed with us for a month or two before escaping through one of the holes that tunnelled under the chickenyard fence. I wish my parents had known how to take better care of the capy -- or at least known they didn't know how to take care of him, and sent him to a zoo.

A baby capy snuggling up to an adult in the National Zoo, Kuala Lumpur, September 2005. You can see how damp they were!

It was a mistake of immaturity, not indifference. My mother was very fond of the capy. She says he was a beautiful animal, with big eyes and a sweet face. One day, she decided to put him into the bathtub and let him have a swim. Or perhaps she wanted to bathe him, I'm not sure. At any rate, I was having a bath at the time. I don't know which of us went into the tub first, but the capy obviously decided that I was in his territory and he didn't like it. He nipped me on the knee. I suppose I howled, although, as I say, I have no memory of the incident.

The bite left no scar, either physical or emotional. If anything, hearing that story over the years stoked my interest in animals rather than extinguishing it. I have always felt it to be a mark of distinction; how many other people can say that they were bitten by a capybara in their bathtub?

Categories: My Animal Stories