Love looks hard

...but not for two enamoured porcupines

And life makes love look hard
The stakes are high, the water's rough
But this love is ours Taylor Swift

Below is a short extract¹ from some video I shot nearly 30 years ago in a Wildlife Conservation and Rescue centre on the outskirts of Chiang Mai.

The full video is just over 7 minutes; the encounter must have lasted longer.

What always strikes me when I watch it is the tenderness and affection (or ‘observable affiliative behaviour’ as I think it would be described less anthropomorphically.) There’s lots of mutual nose rubbing sniffing and nuzzling- with the female always in control.

If you play it with the sound on, you hear the rustling (almost rattling) of the spines on the female’s tail, indicating readiness. (1:24 and 1:57)

“When love beckons to you, follow him, Though his ways are hard and steep. And when his wings enfold you yield to him, Though the sword hidden among his pinions may wound you.” Khalil Gibran

Thailand has two species of porcupines: Atherurus macrourus, (the Asiatic Brush-tailed Porcupine เม่นหางพวง) and the more common Hystrix brachyura, (the Malayan or Himalayan Crestless Porcupine เม่นใหญ่แผงคอยาว). These are the latter.

“When the female is ready to mate, she’ll present her hindquarters and curve her tail over her back so that her quills don’t impale the male. She’ll also lay the rest of her quills flat against her body, allowing the male to mount her briefly with little danger.” (Live Science)

The quills, I learned, are keratin-coated structures that “lie flat normally but erect when the animal is threatened, easily detaching to embed into an attacker’s skin using microscopic, backward-facing barbs.” My theory is that Nature got a bit carried away, setting out to give the animal a dozen or so handy defensive barbs and ending up in a frenzy of over 30,000. (In the same way as I approach a slab of finest Gorgonzola.) Still, porcupines have survived in spite of our efforts to eliminate other species from our habitat, so they must be regarded as one of Nature’s many successes.

The porcupines have a message for us: “A little less eros, folks, and a lot more philia and agape.”

1. apologies for poor quality of copy and lack of editing ability