Tiny Baby Porcupine Adorably Drinks From A Bottle

The rule that babies are cute and cuddly has just been broken. This baby porcupine is far from cute, and probably not cuddly. One false move and its handler is going to get a handle full of quills.

It almost seems like our creator gave this poor creature its dangerous raiment as an afterthought. Like the scent of a skunk, the pointy quills of the porcupine are purely defensive. The porcupine cannot shoot its quills; its enemy has to go out of its way to poke its nose or paw into them. When that happens, the predator will run away yelping, howling, and crying in severe agony. If you have ever seen what such quills can do to an animal, like your pet dog, it’s not pretty. A mouth full of quills is very serious.

The porcupine doesn’t have to be mean or threatening or angry. It doesn’t have to do anything but peaceably go about its business, which is usually eating, and for the lucky few that meet each other once a year, mating. This little guy is a proof that porcupines do, indeed, mate. Porcupines eat tree bark, and climb them, which is why they can be found in trees. In fact, you don’t necessarily have to look up to see if a porcupine is in a tree. You can tell if one is there now, or at least has been in one, because the base of the tree will be a piled up mound of porcupine poop and rotting detritus. Should you ever walk through a hardwood forest and come across a random mound of brown matter at the foot of a tree, look up. Crouching between its branches, you may see the porcupine looking down at you, or even porcupine .

We also see them crossing roads sometimes. There was a time before the age of steel belted reinforced tires, when running over a porcupine with your car spelled instant flat tire. There is also a lesser known devilish side to the porcupine that very nearly cost this author his life: they will chew on the rubber brake lines that connect to your hydraulic brake cylinders underneath your car. Why would a porcupine chew on your brake lines? Because rubber, to the porcupine, is tasty. Rubber is an organic substance essentially made from the sap of a tree. It’s full of complex sugars. Sure, you wouldn’t want to eat rubber, but nobody ever told the porcupine that rubber brake lines are not for eating. Many a driver has coasted down a mountain highway, then hitting the brakes to avoid the road crew leaning on their shovels in the middle of the road, and find to his horror…nothing! No brake fluid, no brakes. After making it home alive and perplexed, your perplexed mechanic soon finds the problem, for the teeth marks in the rubber hose are as telling as the shark teeth marks in a surfboard.

Look at this guy’s ears, aren’t they something? They even look human. Such a funny looking little fellow poses no threat to anyone at the moment. You might say he’s in good hands.