A man cut open a dead porcupine in search of a Chinese mineral and inadvertently delivered its baby, as he was searching for mushrooms by the side of the road Saturday.
Jared Buzzell of Maine was in search of wild mushrooms, which he uses for “medicinal” purposes, when he saw a car hit and kill a porcupine, reports CBS News. He cut open the dead mother hoping to find a valuable mineral he had heard forms in its stomach, but found the baby instead.
“[I] cut the sack open and out fell the porcupine. I cut the umbilical cord, put it in a hat,” Buzzell explained to ABC affiliate WMTW News. “We thought it was dead. I started massaging it. All kinds of stuff started coming out of its lungs, so it started breathing.”
Buzzell plans to care for the porcupine until it can be given to an animal rescue — porcupines cannot be kept as pets in Maine. He feeds the tiny porcupine formula every two to three hours using his daughter’s toy baby doll bottle, reports WMTW.
He was probably searching for a bezoar stone, which is a mass found in stomachs sometimes used for medicinal purposes — bezoar is Persian for “antidote,” according to Wikipedia. Another very reliable site, porcupinebezoar.com, says the stone is a “tried and tested” Chinese medicine used for almost any ailment, including cancer.
Watch WMTW’s report: