It was awesome! One even rolled over on its side to get belly rubs. Definitely would recommend for any animal lovers. :)
https://www.gatorland.com/animals/meet-a-capybara/
Link for anyone interested.
Not my pic, but this is in my city, Curitiba:
I used to visit that specific park (Parque Barigüi) fairly often, as I worked nearby. For me the fun part wasn’t even interacting with the capybaras, but watching tourists interacting with them. Not recommended - unlike the ones in the OP, these here are wild and might have ticks, but… well, neither tourists nor capybaras give a fuck.
Just make sure that you don’t go full “squeee” and chase them, they’ll simply get into the water and you’ll be sad. A girl whom I used to date did this.
It’s actually quite risky. Some people died last month in Brazil because of the disease that’s is transmitted by these ticks (Rocky Mountain spotted fever if I got it right from google, febre maculosa in Portuguese).
Ticks can carry deadly diseases where I live too, and we’ve got a lot of them.
With a decent tick repellant for myself and pets, I can’t recall the last time I had one on me.
I remember news about that. It was in Campinas - there was a huge capybara population boom.
That city is in a specially bad spot for this sort of disease because it’s heavily populated like Curitiba, but unlike Curitiba it has a huge rural area. Like, you walk in Barão Geraldo neighbourhood and it’s booming, then you walk a bit more and suddenly you’re in the middle of nowhere. The odds of infecting livestock that infects people are fairly high, and with the demographic density in Campinas proper you get it from person to person.
Still better to do what the OP did though. If you want to hug the oversized rodents, make sure that there’s people taking care of them, and ensuring that they’re OK.
Adorable! I’d love a domesticated one. I’d imagine they give great cuddles
Too bad domestication takes generations. 😭 My buddy loves capybaras so much he has a tattoo of one.
Nope, but after researching everything you’d need to do to provide a suitable environment for a capybara, it seems super unfeasible. Besides breeding a desire for human companionship into capybaras, they require huge enclosures and access to large bodies of water since they’re semi aquatic. Furthermore, the water would need to be thermally regulated and regularly filtered because that’s where they defecate and stuff.
You can alter a creature’s biology and behavior with domestication to an extent, but it seems like you’d have to be filthy rich or overhaul what a capybara is just to make having one as a pet a humane option.
They’ll just have to keep being our buddies in the wild (or in dedicated sanctuaries).
Are they soft? Do they make cute noises? Would love to pet one if I could. Looks like this guy really liked the attention.
They are actually bristly. Apparently they purr and make sounds similar to a guinea pig according to their handler, but the only noise we heard was the goose complaining that he wasn’t getting fed. They loved being fed romaine lettuce and enjoyed chin scratches as well.
It’s the best type of fish ever…
Nice! I got to eat one of those once when staying with a native family in the Bolivian Amazon. It was quite nice.
I never ate capybara meat, what people often mention about it is that it’s strong-tasting and grassy. Plus in my city it feels like as much of a sacrilege as hurting the Paraná pines or the azure jays. Like, I think that you’d get an easier time murdering people than those three.
