A little while back, I met a capybara, the world’s largest rodent, for a coffee-and-carrot date at a café in Tokyo. This has become a ritual when I visit the city. I sat on a couch next to Pisuke, who stared ahead with the two eyes perched atop his enormous head connected to his coconut-shaped body, generating what seemed like friendliness and calm across the room, which was filled with his equally substantial brother Kohaku and about ten human admirers from around the world. I stroked his straw-like fur and the pinkish skin beneath, thick as sailcloth. His ears looked like morel mushrooms, and sometimes they would twitch, to the delight of my fellow human visitors. I scratched under his chin, and he half closed his eyes and lifted up his head to give me better access to this source of pleasure.
I sipped my coffee and then passed him a carrot stick. He did not grab the carrot with his mouth the way, say, a dog would but turned slowly and delicately toward me and chomped down on it with his long, discolored rodent teeth, his tiny, almost human tongue flicking between his massive jowls. I picked up one of his paws—smooth-furred, unlike the rest of him—and marvelled at his seemingly slapdash assembly. The human tongue, the powerful buckteeth that never stopped growing, the giant muscular haunches and posterior, and these dark-colored paws, partly webbed because the capybara is a semiaquatic creature. “How is this animal even real?” a friend asked me after I showed her a selfie of me and Pisuke, whose weight looked to be fast approaching my own. (A capybara can weigh up to two hundred and twenty pounds, though most hover closer to a hundred and forty.)
The unreality of the capybara is partly responsible for its cultlike following. The past years have seen the rise of capybara TikTok and Instagram. If you have been following the beast on your socials, you might know that capybaras get hiccups; that they carry large oranges and yuzu on their heads; that they allow birds to eat the schmutz out of their fur, which brings them almost orgiastic levels of delight; that they try to help injured corgis escape from their protective cones; that they cuddle with monkeys and lick baby kangaroos; that a group of them adopted a cat named Oyen into their social group at a Japanese zoo. You might have heard the catchy anthem of the capybara, which consists mostly of “ca-py-ba-ra” sung in sultry and tropical tones, along with some Russian lyrics too ridiculous to print (the song was written by a random guy from Moscow). You might have heard of $TUPI, a dubious meme coin launched to celebrate the birth of a particularly cute San Antonio Zoo capy. (The zoo denies any association with the coin.) And, if you’re like me, you might have journeyed to one of the capybara hot spots around the world, including Japan, where capybaras can be found in cafés and onsen, or hot-spring baths, which, unlike cafés, are a perfect place for the creature to enjoy immersion in water. The country even has a capybara hotel for closer communion with the animals.
On my previous trip to Japan, I brought my son to the Tokyo café—he was nine years old at the time and is now eleven, and trades capybara swag with a friend at his school—but we found out that getting a thirty-minute date with a capy was, in the words of one aficionado, “harder than getting Taylor Swift tickets,” and required logging on to a Web site at the right time and hitting the Purchase button before the competition could. My son was allowed a brief pet of one of the rodents and then we had to leave. On my most recent visit to the café, the room held people from several continents, some of whom had come to Tokyo just to hang out with the two animals. A woman from Atlanta talked about the capybara yoga that was now being offered in her city. A man from Montreal was enthusing about the capybaras found in his home town’s bio-dome. Young couples were forming throuples with the ear-flicking Kohaku. “I think I could live my life as one,” a man declared, of the capybara. Someone else added, “I think we all could.”
I had started my day hungover and melancholy after a long night of Tokyo highballs and a morning dose of middle-aged ennui, but after my half hour with Pisuke was over I felt immersed in tantric levels of well-being. (“They regulate you down,” my shrink told me a few weeks later, as we watched a video that featured superimposed capybaras sashaying down a fashion runway.) Time flowed differently, and my vision felt soft and the world around me pure and unaggressive. After I left the café, I bought a peanut-butter sandwich and a jelly sandwich, and I mushed the two together and sat on a commuter bench and ate both sandwiches at once and never had I tasted anything so sweet and good, and every passing salaryman and woman was my brother and sister, and the world’s biggest city was just an Amazon riverbank, and we were all living our lives as giant rodents that never meant anybody any harm. I wanted to cry soulfully to commemorate the moment, but contentment this complete affirmed itself.
I fell in love with capybaras at least two decades before the recent craze. Around 2001, I had sold my first book and was dating a woman after half a decade of loneliness that had followed a breakup with my college girlfriend and the rejection of said first book by both an agent and the Iowa writing school. There was a newfound happiness, maybe even a swagger, to my life as my novel neared publication and my arms found someone to embrace at night. My then girlfriend and I lived in Fort Greene, Brooklyn, and we would visit the Prospect Park Zoo, where we quickly became enamored with the resident capybara. Of course, I was taken with his ridiculous shape and size, but I was also projecting my past loneliness onto him, the many years I had spent in the cage of unreciprocated love. Finally, I thought, here was a being with a body as ridiculous as my own, and a sweetness that made me nostalgic for a past self.
The nascent Internet of the age had told us that the capybara was a social creature—as many rodents are—and that having a single capy, without access to other animals, much less to his own kind, was unusual. (I don’t know why the zoo had only one.) It was sad yet unsurprising when the animal I so loved passed away—perhaps, I thought, from heartbreak. Of course, it is quite possible that he simply died of old age, but, as I said, there is something about the capybara that invites projection. Having endured years of apartness myself, I wondered if the animal had been unable to survive without an outpouring of tactile love.
Our relationship with these creatures is somewhat suspect. “Thank you for changing my life,” a cartoon woman in an Instagram meme says to a capybara, to which the animal replies, “I’m literally a giant rodent.” Is this what the deceased zoo specimen, or Pisuke or Kohaku, stuck in a small Tokyo room without a body of water to swim in, might say to us if they could speak with their funny tongues? “I’ve changed your life,” each of them might have added. “But what good has it done me?”
The only oversized rodent in New York City at the moment is in the Staten Island Zoo. I took my son to see it at the close of 2023, and here, too, the capybara was all alone in her enclosure, although the zoo did have two capybaras at one point. The capybara was very shy and barely came out to meet us. Meanwhile, two other female capybaras, named Cheesecake and Pumpkin, who feature on an Instagram account called Dark Wings Wildlife, had become one of my obsessions. For around thirty-five dollars, you can get the six-month-old Cheesecake or the two-year-old Pumpkin to munch on a piece of edible paper containing any message you like. (I ate some of the paper myself, to test its safety.) Requests flow in from all over the world, including a French “Capy birthday mon cœur! ” and German parents wishing their son good luck on his driver’s exam. I reached out to the account’s owner, Marina Somma, who invited me to visit Cheesecake and Pumpkin.
Dark Wings Wildlife is a six-and-a-half-acre property on the eastern coast of Florida which, in addition to the two capybaras, is home to an African pied crow named Trixie, three goats, two dogs, a cat, an old chicken, and a blind goose. Many Americans, including me, dream of having pet capybaras, but few can truly accommodate them. Somma has a degree in animal psychology and has worked in zoos. She has installed a small pool for her capybaras, and there are plenty of other animals for them to play with, including the two boisterous dogs, and acres of grass for them to feast upon. The Florida climate is similar to that of the capybaras’ homelands—they are found in every country in South America except Chile, usually in places where dense forests and grasslands meet water sources, such as rivers and swamps. Capybaras have suffered from frostbite in more northern locales. Two capys now housed at a sanctuary in Indiana called the Pipsqueakery had to have their toes removed after being left in the snow at their former home.
Somma and her husband, Vinny, picked me up at the Daytona Beach airport in their storm-battered Tesla—Hurricane Milton had ravaged Florida about a month before my visit—and we rolled past a typical Floridian Panda Express landscape with the occasional head-turning concerns, such as Gospel Garden Landscape and Nursery, and Rehab Sports Bar. Somma and Vinny, both in their thirties, met when they were high-school students living in the area, though Vinny originally hails from Staten Island. We drove up to their tidy little farm, which consists of a main house, where Cheesecake and the dogs and cat live—its living room is centered around an enormous television that plays football coverage at most hours—and a barn, where Pumpkin lives in a stall with the goats, the chicken, and the blind goose. There is also a surprisingly large and intricate aviary for the highly intelligent pied crow, who is friends with Pumpkin and the dogs, with whom she sometimes stages impromptu races, or “zoomies,” the animals running along the length of the aviary’s screen.
“One of the biggest misconceptions is that they’re so chill,” Somma said, of capybaras. She told me that the capybara is a prey animal in its native habitat, and that, unlike dogs or other common animals that people keep as pets, it has prey reactions, especially when cornered. “They’ll get panicky and freak out,” she said, adding that “some are well socialized and do well.” In Tokyo, Pisuke and Kohaku spend the bulk of their days with human strangers who pet them and ply them with a never-ending supply of carrots. Pumpkin and Cheesecake are rarely subject to human visitors, and I could sense their innate distrust of me as soon as I approached, even though I do not resemble their traditional enemies, which include the jaguar, the anaconda, and the alligator-like caiman. Of course, humans often hunt the capybara for its meat and skin. The Catholic Church in Venezuela bent the rules for the semiaquatic animal, allowing it to be eaten during Lent. Capybaras, as prey animals, instinctively situate themselves in groups along lakes and riverbanks—the water, in which they can be submerged for up to five minutes, serves as a means of escape from land animals, and the land can provide refuge from the nefarious caiman.
Inside the stall, Pumpkin, the two-year-old—capybaras can live for about twelve years with proper human care, and for about ten years in the wild—eyed me warily, even as I lowered myself to her level to appear nonthreatening. “They’re very suspicious of new things,” Somma told me. “Which is a good way to behave if you don’t want to be eaten.” Pumpkin sleeps in a makeshift bed that is composed of a trough, a dog bed, and an old Tempur-Pedic mattress. As capybaras enjoy pooping in water, there is a large bucket for her; despite my infatuation with all things capybara, I could not quite stomach its smelly greenish contents.
Cheesecake, like most teen-agers, likes to sleep a lot—Somma compared her to a cat in this regard—and she can often be found beneath a blanket in her comfortable glass-and-steel enclosure in the main house, impersonating a ghost. Often, I forgot she was there until the blanket stirred and assumed the barrel shape of the capybara. When roused from her slumber, she enjoyed playing with Stevie, a Shetland sheepdog, and barking (one of capys’ many vocalizations) at the robot vacuum. Capybaras are known to be gregarious, and social media certainly plays up their affable qualities, but within this menagerie it was Stevie who served as the social glue.
Capys, who are often suspicious of interlopers like me, can also be unfriendly with members of their own species who are not part of their family group. The relationship between Cheesecake and Pumpkin, who are not related, has been complex, with the younger animal following the older one around. During the worst encounters, Pumpkin will try to nibble on Cheesecake’s butt. “In the wild, there’s rarely a mixing of different capybara groups,” Somma said. Since the house is Cheesecake’s domain and the outdoors is Pumpkin’s, the large porch serves as a meeting place, with Stevie the Sheltie, in her instinctual herder’s role, acting as chaperon. I witnessed one such scene, in which the two capybaras regarded each other warily at first, then commenced friendly sniffing. When Pumpkin moved away, however, Cheesecake couldn’t help but trail behind. “Don’t follow her, Cheese!” Vinny warned the younger animal. “She’ll get annoyed.” And soon enough Pumpkin scampered off the porch and ran toward her home in the stall. Later, I watched videos of further progress between the two rodents, with Cheesecake and Pumpkin spending semi-unsupervised mornings together, eating grass just a few feet apart—what parents of toddlers call “parallel play.”
Somma believes a capybara has the intelligence of a dog, “not a border collie but a very standard dog.” Pumpkin can get up on her hind legs, her little black semiaquatic paws pressed to her chest, to get a treat, and is able to spin around on command. Although, unlike Cheesecake, she almost never barks, she talks in wild torrents with a combination of gentle squeaks and chittering noises. There are hundreds of thousands of Cheesecake and Pumpkin fans on Instagram and TikTok, and Somma hopes that people who love them will be inspired to protect capybaras. Dark Wings Wildlife is incorporated as a 501(c)3, and Somma wants to grow slowly and introduce more animals that can fulfill educational roles, including some otters and a full aviary of non-releasable vultures. She imagines that one day the space could open as a glamping retreat for animal-lovers. “Florida is kind of a wild place,” she told me, of the state’s licensing regime. “You can have a capybara under a pet license.” Aside from the time they spend on animal upkeep, which is partly subsidized by the money from the edible Capygrams (these can bring in a hundred and forty dollars a day), Somma and Vinny work remotely for a company that runs various Web sites.
I had spent four hours with the two capybaras, and the feeling of contentment I’d experienced in Tokyo settled over my shoulders as if I had spent the whole day listening to Headspace or drinking chilled red wine on a summer porch. I was happily asleep in my hotel room by 7 p.m. The depth of my surrender felt like the wonderful knockout anesthesia administered before a colonoscopy. I had so internalized my new capy friends that I might have chittered in my sleep.
The next day, Somma and I fed all the animals in the early-morning light, including the blind goose and the chicken, who looked like an old disgruntled Eastern European couple in their stall. “Hello, Ma’am, how are you?” Somma said to each creature, in her light Southern accent. (Except for the goose, she keeps only female animals.) In addition to copious amounts of grass, the capybaras are fed green beans, squash, sweet potato, carrots, and kale, and are given additional Vitamin C to prevent scurvy. They love eating corn on the cob, a suitable exercise for their ever-growing teeth. I sat down on the cold grass—the temperature had turned unseasonably chilly, to the capys’ discomfort—and fed Pumpkin grass pellets. I scratched her neck and she looked at me with the placid goofiness that has inspired so much love of capybaras on social media. Somma compared that look to the James Franco expressions of his “Pineapple Express” era.
When a car passed along a distant country road, Pumpkin flared her nostrils, always on alert for a predator. To allay her fears of being cornered, I squatted and then moved toward her slowly. Her flightiness brought to mind the childhood bullying I endured from friends and family, and my constant need to find an exit in case the people around me got overzealous and wanted to kick me or throw a punch. It dawned on me that the capybara represented a duality I knew all too well: a desperately friendly creature always afraid of being attacked. Is this why people love the capybara? Do we all feel trapped in a world that encourages us to be hyper-social yet rewards us with nothing but endless existential anxiety?
I asked Somma why she thought people like me were so interested in capybaras. “They’re such sweet animals,” she said. “You can sit there and have a connection with them that is not tactile.” As she spoke, Stevie the Sheltie was jumping all over me, trying to get me to love her and perhaps give her a grass pellet, but Pumpkin just peacefully registered me with her side eye, and that was all I needed.
When I returned home from Florida, I took my son to see “Flow,” a new animated fantasy-adventure film from the Latvian director Gints Zilbalodis, which is set in a drowned post-apocalyptic world. The protagonist, a black cat, journeys through this often scary landscape with newfound companions, including a Labrador retriever, a ring-tailed lemur, a secretary bird, and, of course, a capybara. Everyone in the audience laughed when the capybara first appeared onscreen, even the little kid behind us who had cried earlier, scared of some of the calamities befalling the feline hero. Just seeing that familiar barrel shape put people at ease. I was astonished by how well the writers and director had portrayed the capybara: in the film, the animal mostly sleeps, eats grass, and gets along with other animals. When scared, it retreats. An unlikely hero, but a perfect one for our times.
I had seen capybaras on my phone, in the movie theatre, and in a Japanese café and a Florida home. But it was not enough. I needed to go to the source of my obsession. I needed to book a passage to South America.
Two things stood out from my daily online immersion in Capy World. First, there was a Brazilian capybara influencer named Luciano Mochinski who had befriended a gaggle of capybaras living in the southern city of Curitiba. Second, there was a slow-motion social-and-environmental drama playing out in the high-end Buenos Aires suburb of Nordelta which pitted wealthy homeowners against the working-class rodent, who, for some of its fans, had become a kind of capy Che Guevara. Both phenomena urgently required my investigation.
I landed in Buenos Aires in early December, which is early summer in the Southern Hemisphere. I started out by paying a visit to the city’s Ecoparque, on the edge of the Palermo neighborhood, where YouTube had promised me a large collection of capybaras. I walked up and down the park, followed by a peacock who kept making aggressive noises. “Shut up,” I told it. “Seriously.” In capybara lore, two of the most farcical enemies of the rodent are the pelican and peacock, both of which try to bite it, to minimal effect. (The capybara is too large to be eaten by them.) Finally, I stumbled on an English-speaking human family by a tapir exhibit and asked them if they knew where I could find my spirit animal.
“We’re looking for it, too!” the family’s matriarch said.
It turned out they were from Vancouver. I have found that capybaras and Canadians, two of the world’s gentlest creatures, are generally simpatico. I asked the family members what drew them to the capybara. “It’s fascinating and so docile,” a middle-aged man said.
“I like oranges,” a red-headed girl said, in reference to the citrus that capybaras bathe with in Japanese onsen.
“There’s a giraffe here,” a boy said consolingly, when I complained about the park’s lack of giant rodents.
I showed them a photo of Cheesecake sitting imperiously on Somma’s living-room couch, the capybara’s keeper almost dwarfed by her charge. “Now, don’t get any ideas,” the mother said to the red-headed girl.
Finally, in a mixture of English and Spanish, we confronted some park workers, who told us, in reference to the capybara, or carpincho, as it is called in Spanish, “No más.” We were instead directed to the Patagonian mara, a rabbitlike animal that hopped around the Ecoparque at will. We left, dejected.
The next day, I took an Uber up to the gated community of Nordelta. We drove north, past what looked like villas miseria, the shantytowns that have historically earned much Peronist attention, and a naval college, before checkpoints appeared, along with many advertisements for Aperol spritzes. Historically, capybaras lived in the swamps near Nordelta, but the development of what has been called a kind of Miami in Argentina disrupted their habitat. The development also eliminated many of the capybaras’ natural predators, however, and an increasing number of the rodents have recently reëmerged to eat the plentiful manicured grass and leave their waste product all over the expensive properties.
The resulting conflicts have got violent, especially when small dogs are involved. A resident had sent me a gruesome image of a mangled dog that had needed stitches after a purported capybara encounter, one of several that had taken place since the pandemic between the indigenous carpinchos and the colonialist French poodles. “Attack of the Giant Rodents or Class War?” the Guardian asked in a headline.
I had arranged to meet the Argentinean friend of an Italian friend of mine, who lived in one of the gated compounds and had promised to show me around. I’d arrived early, getting past the layers of security by visiting a local restaurant. (My driver had to present his license for inspection.) At the restaurant, the sun shone through an octagonal skylight onto the sushi station as I perused a very expensive menu. Women wore white tees and pink shorts; men clipped their sunglasses onto the “V”s of their V-necks. When I looked out the window, I saw them—a whole family of capybaras on the banks of a nearby man-made lake. I swallowed my two Milanese cutlets as fast as my esophagus allowed and rushed into the warm sunlight.
I counted ten babies scurrying around, about typical for capybara family planning, several males, including the alpha male—he is chosen in part because of his size, and also the size of the brown scent gland atop his nose—and a female, with a much smaller scent gland. Like some other mammals, capybaras organize themselves according to a “harem” system, in which the dominant male gets to impregnate the females, who then practice what’s called alloparenting, providing milk and care to babies that may not be their own. Female capys generally stay in the area where they were born, but young males often leave to strike out on their own, becoming, in zoological terminology, “floaters.”
The family enjoyed the grass and the water, the babies grazing under Mom’s watchful side gaze while the dad did his laps. A teen-age capybara—about Cheesecake’s age—took his siblings for a stroll, and they played tag for a while, then sat around a tree, exhausted. Town houses gleamed in the distance, along with a new construction labelled “Swiss Medical”; a man attacked a playground with a leaf blower while traffic passed incessantly. The babies went for a swim as their mom observed them. They emerged glistening brown, and followed their mother’s white flank along the shore. I watched them for hours.
Many residents of Nordelta view capys the same way New Yorkers view rats, but some of the construction workers who are building the settlement’s endless villas and the women who provide housekeeping gathered around the lake to watch the carpinchos with knowing smiles. A young man I had met for dinner at a steak house in Buenos Aires told me that his housekeeper, who came from an impoverished neighborhood south of the city, had kept a capybara in her home for years when she was young. The capybara was truly earning its bona fides as an animal celebrated by the working class, a symbol of resistance.
The resident I’d arranged to meet was named Marcos. Middle-aged and a relatively new arrival to Nordelta, Marcos drove me past many checkpoints, giving me an overview of the situation. Marcos is from a northern province where carpinchos are omnipresent, and he likes the animal in that setting, if not in this one. “People are not happy,” he told me, of the attitude in Nordelta toward the capys. “They make everything dirty. They swim in your pool. They are nice, but the little dogs like to bark and the capybara gets scared and reacts. The little dogs get very hurt.” So that was it, I thought. Not naked aggression but a miscommunication between an overly expressive creature and one that, despite its friendliness, is an anxious prey animal.
“There is no more room for the grasslands,” Marcos said, pointing out developments. “All these places were for capybaras two years ago, so now they go to our houses.” We visited a local golf course, one of the rodents’ favorite haunts (they keep the grass short). “There are usually a lot more capybaras,” Marcos said. “I wonder what Nordelta is doing. Maybe they took them somewhere.” He told me that one resident had put up an electric fence that would shock the capybaras, and it became a national scandal. He showed me a little slice of remaining wetland behind barbed wire, and told me that the capybaras in his home province live well and without any conflicts. I asked him about a sign that read “Carpincho.” Apparently, one of the gated communities has been named after the creature that its residents want gone.
Having seen what human-rodent conflict looked like in Buenos Aires, I headed to the city that has become something of a mecca for capybara-lovers: Curitiba, Brazil.
Curitiba is a tidy, charming place known by transportation nerds for its pioneering bus system (passengers enter futuristic black tubes before getting on buses that speed along in dedicated lanes). If Buenos Aires has turned its back on its carpinchos, Curitiba cannot get enough. At the Oscar Niemeyer Museum gift shop, instead of picking up souvenirs celebrating the famous architect, I bought my family many pairs of capybara socks and considered having a giant macrame capybara shipped home. (When I got back to New York, my son eagerly scrolled through all the capybara photographs I had taken in South America and placed his new loot next to his capybara slippers.) The gift shop at the city’s beloved botanical gardens also had a capy section, from which I sourced capybara notebooks, bookmarks, and pins. A young girl ran up to her parents begging them to buy all the stuffed capybaras on display.
When I arrived, the city was being deluged by rain so strong that my oversized hotel umbrella soon proved useless. I Ubered over to Barigui Park, one of the largest green spaces in Curitiba and home to the most capybaras of any park in the city—about seventy, I was told—and found it completely sodden, some of the paths and roadways submerged. Barigui serves as a kind of sponge for Curitiba, with the frothy Barigui River running through the park and rainwater descending from the surrounding hills. I was told two versions of how the capybaras ended up here.In the first, a mayor placed them in the park to keep the grass trimmed (alongside some sheep, now gone). In the second, they swam down the Barigui River and made the park their home. I prefer the second version, which gives the capybaras more agency.
My sneakers drenched, I decided to honor my rodent friends by forging ahead through this aquascape. At last, I found them—a family of about sixteen, grazing like brown sheep on the banks of the flooded river. The sound of dogs barking floated over from some of the mansions in the distance, but these animals were not deterred from their grassy lunch. Water-logged joggers ran through the group at high speeds, but the capybaras, despite their prey instincts, barely moved to let them through, completely habituated as they were to humans. Trucks full of Curitibanos often stopped on the half-flooded nearby road to take photos of the family; unlike in Nordelta, the locals here were proud of their rodent mascot. I glanced around this pastoral scene, recognizing from my Instagram feed each of the residential skyscrapers flanking the park. I have seen so many videos from the capybara influencer Luciano Mochinski of the animals jumping into the nearby pond that I knew this particular skyline better than I knew Manhattan’s.
After a change of socks, I met Fernanda Wendt, a young veterinarian who has studied under one of the world’s greatest capybara experts at the local Federal University of Paraná. We convened in a café specializing in capybara-shaped pastéis. I bit into the fried hindquarters of my animal pastry as it oozed chocolate and condensed milk. Wendt cares for many animals, including guinea pigs. (Cheesecake and Pumpkin, in Florida, are treated using a veterinary protocol designed for guinea pigs, a close relative of capybaras.) Like Somma, Wendt wants to complicate perceptions that the capybara has a docile nature. In some capybara videos I have seen, the males fight—they rise on their hind legs and look like they’re both slapping and kissing one another. “When the males reach puberty,” Wendt explained, “they get kicked out by the dominant male. The wandering males then get attacked. They fight and scratch with their nails.” She continued, “The dominant male has a very pronounced scent gland over his nose. He releases pheromones from the scent gland, which he rubs against things like trees, leaving a sticky white trail.”
Wendt continued, “The capybara is a very hard animal to take care of from a veterinary perspective. It’s hard to do daily management in a small enclosure, because often they will die from stress.” When veterinarians and zoologists do work with wild capybaras, they frequently have to shoot a tranquilizing dart into them first.
I showed Wendt videos of Luciano Mochinski hugging and petting capybaras, and she was mildly horrified. She told me that ticks carrying Brazilian spotted fever are sometimes found on or near capybaras. The disease has a low survival rate for humans. “Rodents are the most biodiverse mammals in the world,” Wendt told me, highlighting the capybara’s adaptability as one reason it is not endangered. She tried to steer me toward other local species, such as the paca, which is also a fairly large rodent, but I was not interested. “The tapir is more interesting and threatened than the capybara,” she assured me. “They spread seeds around. They are the gardeners of the forest.”
“Yes,” I said, noncommittally, biting into my capybara pastel.
Luciano Mochinski picked me up the next morning in a little car embellished with the insignia of the local telecom company, a giant ladder strapped to its roof. He installs Internet, TV, and telephone services, and a lot of his spare time is spent befriending capybaras. Like almost everyone I met in Curitiba, Mochinski, who is fifty, has ancestral connections to Poland. His bearded, ruddy face was every bit as joyous in person as it was on my phone. “The mayor doesn’t like me petting them,” he told me through a translator, echoing Wendt’s worry about disease. In fact, Curitiba’s mayor commented on Mochinski’s social-media feed, telling him to stop playing with capybaras, which got Mochinski thirty thousand new followers; his wife, who works for city hall, was not amused.
Mochinski, who grew up on a farm that bred rabbits, chickens, and pigs, is a natural with animals. In the park, he walked up to a capybara colored red by the sun—a male, judging by the size of its prominent scent gland—said, in a mixture of English and Portuguese, “My comarada capybara,” and began tapping the capy’s shoulder and scratching its neck. The animal turned to look at him, calmly but with feeling, the way one turns to listen to a friend at a bar. As the rodent lifted its head in pleasure, Mochinski pulled down its lower lip to expose a blade of grass stuck in its teeth. The neck scratching continued, the capybara lifting its head high enough that only its nose was visible. It was hard to remember that, though we were in a city, this was still a wild animal. “You, you,” Mochinski said, inviting me to join in the petting. Life-threatening ticks be damned, I circled around to pet the creature, but it now felt cornered by having humans on two sides (or maybe it was unhappy with my pheromones) and scooted off. “No like you!” Mochinski said, laughing.
He pointed out two capybaras that were knocking their teeth together, one of them the dominant male of the group. Soon they were on their hind legs, and a minor fight broke out for a few seconds, before the non-alpha waddled away in haste. I had spotted incel capybaras wandering around other sections of the park all by their lonesome. There used to be a caiman in the park, according to Mochinski, but it killed a dog and was moved to the city’s zoo. Sometimes “druggies” came to attack capybaras with a gun or a bow and arrow. The rodents have two artificial islands in the middle of the lake, where they go at night for safety. But they are friends with most of the animals in the park, and sometimes, according to Mochinski, you can see geese or vultures riding on their backs.
Mochinski is now a part of this capybara family, who, he says, recognize him by his smell, and is on a petting basis with four of the creatures. He pointed out a young pale-looking capybara and told me it was sick; another had a large red cut across its hindquarters, either from an encounter with a branch or from a fight. “This one needs to go the dentist,” the concerned Mochinski said. A light rain began to fall, but the capybaras paid it no heed. Mochinski told me that he often rushes to see the creatures as soon as he finishes work. When he retires from his telecom job, he wants to open a capybara-based advertising business.
I have found that people who love capybaras want to extend their friendship to humans as well. One night in Curitiba, I went out with my translator, a documentary filmmaker, and the filmmaker’s “gonzo lawyer.” We stayed up late into the night eating and drinking at a Japanese izakaya and becoming immediate friends. “To the capybara!” we toasted, as round after round of banana cachaça cocktails and frothy chopes were deposited at our table and the edamame flowed. We had met that day, but some species of animal and human are just meant for companionship. When we were introduced, a part of me wondered, “Will they eat me?” And then I answered, “No, they are in the arts.” “Will they pet me?” I asked myself. “Yes,” I answered, “if I am as charming as a capybara.” And a few hours later our friendship was complete.
I returned to Buenos Aires for a spell and revisited the Ecoparque. A drawing of capybaras is featured on one of the food stands in the park, so I went to the information office and demanded satisfaction. “¿Dónde están los carpinchos?” I cried. The woman at the office threw up her hands and unleashed a torrent of Spanish. I sat in the middle of the park, listening to tourists asking after the capybara in several languages. Eventually, I made my way to the endangered tapir, which Wendt, back in Curitiba, had recommended as my next love. I remembered meeting the actor and writer Molly Ringwald at a party over the summer, and being told by her that the animal killed by the apes at the start of “2001: A Space Odyssey” was a capybara. That made perfect sense to me, but a zoologist who happened to be on hand intervened and told us it was a tapir. With its giant nose shaking in the wind, the victimized Argentinian tapir shuffled about his enclosure diagonally, like an old man trying to cross Broadway and Eighty-sixth Street in one go. Fine, I thought. There is room for you in my heart as well. ♦
