The Cuy Guinea Pig — It’s What’s for Dinner
When a beloved animal is both food and pet
When I was a kid, my family adopted this strange little beast called a guinea pig. Wilbur would oink incessantly when we opened the fridge to give him lettuce. He’d stand on his hind legs and knock the cage lid for attention. He’d even run around in the non-fenced backyard and come back to the sliding door when he wanted in.
Plus, he was cute as beans.
Pretty crazy for what I thought was essentially a chubby tailless rat. But never in the few special years we had him did I ever think about eating him for dinner.
The history of guinea pigs
While many of us are familiar with guinea pigs as being the cute little oinking creatures popular with children in North America, the animal is actually pretty unique.
Firstly, they don’t exist naturally in the wild. That is, guinea pigs were domesticated and bred for meat for thousands of years. In 2010, some studies were done to trace the origin of the animals.
Their conclusion?
Guinea pigs’ ancestors were likely a species of cavies known as C. tschudii, an animal still found across South America in the wild.
