Biology Reference
In-Depth Information
Why, then, did the North American porcupine come to be widely known by the misnomer “hedge-
hog”? The first English colonists in North America were quite likely unfamiliar with porcupines except
from literary references, since Old World porcupines are absent from Great Britain and most of Europe.
These colonists had a penchant for calling unfamiliar creatures by the names of familiar ones from
“back home,” and in a prickly sort of way the porcupine bears at least a superficial resemblance to the
hedgehog, a common denizen of English hedgerows.
Regardless of names, accurate or otherwise, the porcupine's arsenal of quills is so formidable that
most predators quickly learn the desirability of giving the porky a wide berth. A variety of predators
may occasionally kill a porcupine: these include bobcats, bears, cougars, wolves, coyotes, and wol-
verines. However, after one or two painful encounters, these predators emerge sadder and a great deal
wiser in the ways of porcupines. The single exception seems to be the domestic dog; while some dogs
learn to shun porcupines after one or two episodes, others never seem to learn.
That leaves only two predators—humans and fishers—to control the porcupine population. In the
absence of fishers for a time in many parts of the porcupine's range (see chapter 14), humans attemp-
ted to control the burgeoning numbers of what had become a destructive nuisance. Mostly these efforts
were failures.
A favorite tactic was to pay a bounty for dead porcupines. As with any bounty, the theory was that the
money would induce people to go forth and expend great effort to bring about the demise of large num-
bers of porkies. And as with other bounties, the porcupine bounty proved a failure, mostly because—as
any professional wildlife manager will affirm—bounties simply pay people for killing animals that they
would kill anyway.
A rule of thumb regarding bounties is that in order to be effective, they have to be set so high as to be
prohibitively expensive. Generally, porcupine bounties were established at somewhere between twenty-
five and seventy-five cents—rarely, perhaps a dollar—per animal. Although this was a good deal more
money back in the 1940s and 1950s than it is now, it was hardly munificent enough to generate any
major effort to kill porcupines.
There was one intriguing twist to the bounty business, however. Evidence that a porcupine had been
killed was required before payment was made, and the animal's two ears were the usual proof specified
in the bounty law. There used to be persistent rumors that certain enterprising individuals, possessed
of somewhat elastic consciences, would cut earlike shapes from the unquilled portions of the porkies.
When wizened by a suitable period of drying, the “ears” would be presented as the genuine article to the
town clerk or other agent authorized to make payment. These individuals, rarely expert in such arcane
fields as porcupine anatomy, were unlikely to question the evidence. Thus, supposedly, an unscrupulous
few multiplied their bounty money several fold. Whether this practice actually occurred, at least on any
substantial scale, or is merely the result of rural rumor and folklore, is now buried in the past.
At any rate, the return of fishers to their former habitat proved vastly more effective, and much less
expensive, than bounties or other human efforts to control excess numbers of porcupines. Partially as
a result of smaller porcupine populations, and partly as a result of the disfavor into which bounties in
