By Daniel Wallace

Who knew? I thought I knew everything there was to know about Alabama and then one day I saw a dead armadillo on the side of the road and the first thing that came to mind was how weird it was that someone would kill an armadillo in Texas, where armadillos live, put it in their car, drive all the way here, to Alabama, and then throw it out on the side of the road. Because I grew up in Alabama, and for eighteen straight years almost never left, and I swear that I never saw a single armadillo all that time. I would have remembered that. Now suddenly, on every visit back, I’m seeing them everywhere. There’s an armadillo explosion in Alabama the likes of which I would guess are comparable to nutria in Louisiana, and maybe for a similar reason. Maybe someone brought them here to eat something else. Cats, for instance. I don’t know.

The other oddity about armadillos in Alabama is that I have never seen one that was alive. I’ve seen dozens of armadillos, but they’ve all been dead on the side of the road. So the possibility still exists that someone is bringing whole truckloads of dead armadillos from Texas, where armadillos live, and under the cover of night dropping them off on the side of the highway, all over Alabama. I did ask somebody about this, though; that’s what research is, asking people stuff. And this person told me that yes, there are live armadillos in Alabama and that they are terrible pests and that shooting them is hard because they hop and when they hop make a little yelping sound, the sound a dog makes when you accidentally step on its paw. I don’t know if this is true; it may be; that’s all the research I did. But I hope that raising this issue here will highlight the armadillo question in a way that it hasn’t been highlighted before. What it makes me think is that since I’ve been away a lot of things have changed in Alabama, and armadillos are just one of them, and maybe not even the most important one. Which, when you think about it, is kind of scary.