You have to stay 500 feet from porcupines as well?
So what’s the order? Skin -> Fur -> Quills?
Which leads to the second question, if you pulled out the quills could you make a fur coat out of them?
For North American porcupines, the order is skin, woolly undercoat, and then long guard hairs/fur and quills mixed together. On a relaxed porcupine, the quills aren’t all that visible, except for on the tail. Mostly you can just see the dark brown undercoat and the long golden guard hairs, as in this photo.
An adult porcupine can have 30,000 quills. I imagine it wouldn’t be fun to pull them out, and it would leave an awful lot of holes in the pelt, so I doubt a fur coat would be very practical. I can’t say for sure. Also, porcupines smell terrible, so I wouldn’t be surprised if the fur coat would also smell terrible. That being said, some native peoples traditionally ate porcupine meat, so perhaps there’s a way to wash the odour away. Or, maybe they were just really, really hungry.
Holy shit!:eek:
Never touched a porcupine, but have touched a hedgehog several times. Their quills are pretty sharp too.