![](\"http:\/\/zaakistan.com\/photos\/blog4\/tepezcuintle.jpg\")
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Our friends Erick and Gloria surprised us last night by whisking us off to Cob\u00e1n and taking us to quite a nice restaurant. Up until now, our dining in Cob\u00e1n had been limited to the food court at the mall where we do most of our grocery shopping. I wanted to try something I had never tried before and so “Tepezcuintle” jumped off the menu and onto my plate.<\/p>\n
Erick explains to me that this is a wild animal. “Like the deer?” I ask. “Yes, but smaller” he answers. “Is it like a big rat?” wondering if he is describing a opossum. “No, it’s not like that. It eats fallen fruit – avocados, zapote, etc. It’s meat is the best wild meat in Guatemala.” “So, like a small deer then?” “Yes.” Erick orders the same. “They have some at the little zoo in Chamche, I’ll take you there to see one some time.”<\/p>\n
It was in fact quite delicious, tenderized no doubt by the supple fat that comprised 40% of the small serving. It was in a nice gravy and had been roasted and stewed – like beef. I had to share a small piece with Amber. She liked it too.<\/p>\n
So, now, it’s 4:30 AM and I’m beginning to wonder why I had that cup and a half of coffee at 10 PM. I decided to get up and see if I can burn some of this energy off and why not, look up this mysterious beast online.<\/p>\n
“The Paca (Agouti paca), also known as the Spotted Paca, is a large rodent found in tropical and sub-tropical America, . . . It is called paca in most of its range, but tepezcuintle in Mexico and Guatemala.” Wikipedia<\/a><\/p>\n
To explore the relationship between the ingestion of Agouti paca (AP) and human leptospirosis in Guyana, 19 febrile men who said they had hunted and eaten A. paca . . . Those found positive for anti-Leptospira IgM . . . serovars from three pathogenic species of Leptospira . . . a skin rash; lymphadenopathy; abnormal urine sediment . . . Annals of Tropical Medicine and Parasitology<\/a><\/p>\n
They live in my parents\u2019 farm. I\u2019ve shown these two to a couple of friends and they see them, with scorn, as big rats (the mom is about 60cm long and must weigh around 10kg)… I think they are absolutely great. jpablo’s blog<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n
Now, I know I’m making a big deal about this; people eat porcupine and rabbit all the time right? I grew up eating meat according to the Levitical laws (cloven hoof, chews cud, though not the official kosher bloodletting) so even eating a strip of bacon or shrimp is strange to me.<\/p>\n
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Cute, eh?<\/p>\n
Kingdom: Animalia
Phylum: Chordata
Class: Mammalia
Order: Rodentia
Family: Dasyproctidae
Genus: Agouti
Species: A. paca<\/p>\nOh, and Rabbit Rabbit everyone.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Our friends Erick and Gloria surprised us last night by whisking us off to Cob\u00e1n and taking us to quite a nice restaurant. Up until now, our dining in Cob\u00e1n had been limited to the food court at the mall where we do most of our grocery shopping. I wanted to try something I had … [Read more…]<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":1681,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[15,16,20,30],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"entry","1":"post","2":"publish","3":"author-admin","4":"post-495","6":"format-standard","7":"has-post-thumbnail","8":"category-food","9":"category-guatemala","10":"category-nature","11":"category-zr"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/zaakistan.com\/dir\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/495","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/zaakistan.com\/dir\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/zaakistan.com\/dir\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/zaakistan.com\/dir\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/zaakistan.com\/dir\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=495"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/zaakistan.com\/dir\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/495\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/zaakistan.com\/dir\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1681"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/zaakistan.com\/dir\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=495"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/zaakistan.com\/dir\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=495"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/zaakistan.com\/dir\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=495"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}