THE SOUTH AFRICAN PORCUPINE 



hours of the night, digs up and devours his root crops, 

 and levies toll upon anything eatable of a vegetable 

 nature above the ground. In the pumpkin and 

 melon fields, the Porcupine plays havoc, for it is 

 not content to satisfy its appetite on one pumpkin 

 or melon, but in a single night it may sample a score, 

 and all those which are thus injured rapidly decay. 

 The mealie cob being out of its reach, the stem 

 is gnawed through and the cob falls to the ground. 



If the cob should not be to its liking, it will gnaw 

 the stems of several mealies and sample them all. 

 Like the monkey tribe, when food is plentiful the 

 Porcupine is exceedingly wasteful. 



A Porcupine is a bulky animal of about half the 

 size of an adult domestic pig. The legs are short, and 

 the body cylindrical. 



The appetite of a Porcupine is enormous, and the 

 destruction wrought in cultivated fields by a few of 

 these animals is considerable, and for this reason the 

 Porcupine is hunted down and killed on every avail- 

 able occasion. In South Africa, in spite of the 

 hand of nearly every man being against it, the 

 Porcupine is still fairly plentiful. 



Porcupines, however, are not an unqualified pest 

 to man. They dig up and eat the tulips that are 

 highly poisonous to cattle, and which gradually 

 destroy the grass on the veld ; they devour the melk- 

 bosch, wild onion and aloe, all of which are either 

 poisonous to stock or encumber the land and retard 

 the growth of food plants. In the thorny mimosa 



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