Black market for porcupine meat spurs hunting issue in Pa.

HARRISBURG - After lifting a ban on porcupine hunting, the Pennsylvania Game Commission ran into a thorny problem: reports of a new black market for the rodents' meat in Southeast Asia.

Intelligence reports indicated that people were seeking Pennsylvania porcupines to sell illegally for human consumption in Vietnam, commission officials said.

The eight-member commission responded this week by reversing course and ending a nine-month-old policy of virtually unlimited porcupine hunting during most of the year. Instead, it voted to impose a limit of 10 porcupines per hunter per year. The original limit had been six per day.

Commission spokesman Jerry Feaser said that he could not comment on specifics of any investigation resulting in the change, but that no known porcupine trading was taking place.

The new limit, Feaser said, makes clear that the goal of a porcupine season was not to open the door to mass hunting, but to expand a homeowner's right to shoot nuisance porcupines.

Porcupines, the second-largest rodents after the beaver, are shy, nocturnal creatures attracted to wood, rubber, and metal, making house siding and automobile engine belts attractive to them.

Personal experience figured in the commission's decision in April to create the season. One commissioner said his brother's telephone wires had to be replaced twice after gnawing by porcupines. Another said half the screen door on his hunting cabin had been destroyed.

No studies on population, geographical range, or damage preceded the decision, which allowed hunting of porcupines between September and April 1, allowing the creatures to raise their young in spring and summer. No figures are available for the number of porcupines bagged since September.

Pennsylvania law has long let homeowners kill porcupines that destroy property. Instituting a season, officials said, was meant to "eliminate the gray area" and give owners more leeway to kill troublesome porcupines not on their land.

It is illegal to sell meat of any wild game killed in Pennsylvania, but legal to sell nonedible animal parts such as porcupine quills - used in American Indian art.

Commissioners said that when they voted last spring to create the season, they did not envision opening the door to a black market on porcupines.