In today’s newsletter, Gary Shteyngart explains his love for the world’s biggest rodent, and then:
Caroline Mimbs NyceNewsletter editor
The capybara is big and brown and buck-toothed; it looks like a giant, dusty, rounder rat. The Internet is positively obsessed. So is the writer Gary Shteyngart, who first fell in love with the animal after encountering one at the Prospect Park Zoo, back in 2001. “Of course, I was taken by 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,” he writes, in a piece for this week’s issue. “Finally, I thought, there was a being with a body as ridiculous as my own, but with a sweetness that made me nostalgic for a past self.”
Shteyngart details his expansive love for these mega-rodents, which are native to South America. He travels across three continents to spend time with them: on a farm in Florida, at a café in Japan, and in the suburbs and parks of Argentina and Brazil. Shteyngart and I recently caught up by phone to discuss what makes the capybara so lovable, and what lessons we might learn from these odd creatures. Our conversation has been edited and condensed.
How does one get assigned to write six thousand words about capybaras for The New Yorker?
I was having lunch with one of my editors, Susan Morrison, and she was asking what is interesting to me these days. And the first thing I said was, “I love this giant rodent. I can’t get enough of it. My kid loves the giant rodent. Whenever I feel stressed out, I take out my Instagram, and there’s the rodent.”
Give me the elevator pitch for the capybara, for those who aren’t already capy-pilled.
The first thing you need to know is that it is so large—it’s ridiculous. They vary in terms of how big they get, but I would say a hundred and fifty pounds is a very likely outcome of the capy, which is about twenty-five pounds more than I weigh.
Also, it is one of the chillest animals out there because, while it’s a prey animal, there are only a couple of other animals that are going to be able to chase it down to eat it because it’s so big. And it runs really fast. There are all these memes and videos of capybaras just chilling, which, in the upside-down, horrifying world we live in is just—aah. It’s like balm for the heart.
Are there capy detractors?
Yeah. One thing I wrote about, that necessitated a trip to Argentina, is that the territory where one of the wealthiest suburbs of Buenos Aires is, Nordelta, originally belonged to the capy. But then rich humans came and turned it into this series of gated communities—picture McMansions. After COVID, the capy started getting into fights with their small dogs and eating their manicured grass. So these wealthy landowners and homeowners got really upset, and the capybara became a kind of working-class hero.
What can we, as humans, learn from the capybara?
The capy does, just like humans, face adversity. Humans are probably its biggest predator. Also, the caiman, which is an alligator-type creature, wants to eat it. So does the jaguar.
And, yet, despite all the adversities it suffers, the capybara somehow manages to remain both chill and lovable. It forms symbiotic relationships; for example, some birds will come eat schmutz off its fur. In one zoo, they adopted a cat, and the cat is now a part of the capy family. The capys are completely happy with her. There’s a lot of love between the capy and other animals. They’re just simpatico. We could all learn from that, I think.
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P.S. Looking for your next comfort watch? New Yorker staffers offer their recommendations, including “The Birdcage,” the nineties sitcom “The Nanny,” and tennis matches from summertime Australia, complete with the sound of cockatoos chirping in the background. See more of their suggestions on Instagram or TikTok. 🦜
Hannah Jocelyn contributed to this edition.
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