Come on over, baby. Room 307. Form an orderly line.
it IS friday, you know?
I imagine that must be the paca, which we call here in Panama the conejo pintado (spotted rabbit). It’s actually closer to capybaras and guinea pigs than rabbits. The meat is very tasty - it’s my favorite rodent, even better than guinea pig.
Although I’ve visited El Cedral in the Venezuelan LLanos, which is teeming with capybaras, unfortunately they didn’t have it on the menu the two nights I was there so I’ve never tried it.
that’s the one! yummy indeed. Although endangered. We really shouldn’t be eating them.
When did you go to El Cedral? Who did you work with? I have never been there myself but know (as classmate or pupil) most of the people who worked there then.
You really missed out on the capibara. Sorry to rub it in.
Only a handful of responses, and yet this subject has already attracted the attention of no less than three SDSAB members. If anything can be said of the SDMB, it’s that we really, really like our capybaras! 
Actually, we have a program here at the Smithsonian in Panama to domesticate them so they can be raised in captivity for meat. I’ve had it in small towns in the Darien where there wasn’t much else on the menu. But I haven’t had any for 10 years or so.
I went to El Cedral when I visited Venezuela in 2000. It was spectacular. I haven’t seen so much wildlife outside East Africa. Anaconda, Giant Anteater, Pink Dolphin, caimans, capybara, swarms of bird. My guides were named Victor and Ramon.
I may be in Venezuela again for a conference later this year, so maybe I’ll get another chance. We do have them here in Panama, but they aren’t hunted much or farmed.
Lappe is popular in Trinidad too. It’s very good to eat, as is agouti (a somewhat smaller, capybara-type animal). (Of course you could cook tires and old shoes in curry and coconut milk and it would be good, too…) Other popular wild meats there are manicou (opossum), iguana, tattoo (armadillo - yuck), quenk (wild boar) and a small deer of some kind. I think the agouti is farmed but I don’t know about lappe. I want an agouti for a pet.
While it’s easy enough to chuckle about the idea that “well, the capybara is amphibious, so they called it a fish to get around the no-meat-on-Fridays rule,” it’s important, I think, to remember that the typical peasant diet considered actual cuts of meat, as opposed to leftover scraps and sauces used to flavor starch dishes, to be something eaten on feasts. Roast beef was for special occasions, chicken for Sunday dinner.
And on days of abstinence, you refrained from eating meat, both in commemoration of Jesus’s sacrifice and emulating it in a small way by making your own minor sacrifice, and for the self-discipline of self-deprivation. But, much as Jewish law tended to be interpreted, there was an eye both to unswerving principle and to tempering the command to the necessities of life. So if some small animal was readily available for food, and some agile rationalization would deem it “not meat,” it became exempt from the abstain-from-meat principle. And in Latin America, this started with the cavy, the guinea pig – and was then extended to the caviformes, the rodents related to the cavy.
Polycarp said:
Do you have a cite for this?
Poly?
Jillgat sked for a cite for this assertion of mine, which I remembered reading somewhere and figured would be easy to trace and document.
Yeah, right! List it as “Poly unintentionally perpetuates an unproven factoid,” please! :o
Ok, all this talk about eating capybaras has me nervous. After the recent upgrade at the SDMB headquarters from hamsters to capybaras, I certainly hope that we don’t end up with an increased fee to cover the cost of capybara replacement every Saturday!!! :eek: 
Oh, great. You’ll start some pet trend and next thing you know we’ll have feral giant rodents running lose in DC and not just the almost-giant ones we have now.
I’m anxious to try a capybara stuffed with guinea pigs stuffed with hamsters, the whole seasoned with exotic herbs and spices, then roasted in its own, no doubt plentiful fat.
Reserve your Christmas capyguinster now!
I would recommend nesting some rabbits in there, too, making a capylapiguinster, but most people don’t like finding a hare in their food.
My sources have failed me. The only additional information I have about this is that the Papal dispensation came on the XVIII century. I know there is a good story about why this dispensation was given, it is just that I cannot find it, right now.
Bad Chronos!! No dessert for you!!! :eek:
We’ve got a rat problem here, too. Not as bad as New York City or DC though. I’m pretty sure that capybaras are not nearly as omnivorous at rats so hopefully you won’t have a capybara infestation in your kitchen. They probably make a racket though, and it would certainly be a bummer if you had a bunch of them running around in your attic. Those capybara traps would be dangerous, you’d probably have to bait it with a wheel of brie. Maybe you could use a bear trap.
I wrote to Emilio Herrera, a capybara expert in Venezuela. He’s one of the guys who has stated that the Catholic Church in Venezuela allows consumption of capybaras during Lent, classifying this meat as fish. I asked him for more info. on this and this is what he wrote to me:
Hello, the only reference that I’ ve found to
this is in the book by Eduardo López de Ceballos
(Fauna de Venezuela y su conservación, Editorial
Arte, Caracas, 1974) who says that his
“great-great-grand-uncle” the so-called “Padre
Sojo” whose actual name was Pedro Palacios Gil,
went to Italy at the end of the XVIII century and
obtained a “bula” (a Papal decree) from the Pope
whereby it was established that the capybara,
beacuse of its amphibious habits, was legitimate
lenten fare, just like fish. My personal
impression is that it was more because of the
appearance of the salted and dried capybara
chunks of meat in the markets which was (and is)
very similar to that of equally dried fish, made
people believe that it was similar to fish.
Capybara is eaten well away from its natutal
habitat so people who ate it might not have known what it looked like.
Catholics can eat during a fast? Yom Kippur would be so much easier if Judaism defined fasting the same way. (But then we wouldn’t have the whitefish platter to look forward to at the break fast.)