Summary: <p>As we get closer and closer to Halloween, the monsters get weirder and weirder! This week let’s look at two mystery animals from Scotland, one of which is supposed to break into coffins and eat the bodies! That’s disgusting!</p> <p>A stoat in its winter ermine coat:</p> <p><img class="alignnone size-medium wp-image-857" src="http://strangeanimalspodcast.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/10/ermine-300x199.jpg" alt="" width="300" height="199"></p> <p>The Russian desman:</p> <p><img class="alignnone size-full wp-image-858" src="http://strangeanimalspodcast.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/10/Russian-desman.jpg" alt="" width="220" height="146"><img class="alignnone size-medium wp-image-859" src="http://strangeanimalspodcast.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/10/Russian-desman-hunting-underwater-300x218.jpg" alt="" width="300" height="218"></p> <p><strong>Show transcript:</strong></p> <p>Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I’m your host, Kate Shaw.</p> <p>We’re one week closer to Halloween and things are getting spookier and spookier. This week, we’ll learn about two mystery animals from Scotland. One of them poisons the water it lives in, and the other breaks into coffins to eat dead bodies. oh my gosh that’s horrible</p> <p>The lavellan was supposed to be a rat-like rodent but bigger than a rat with an oversized head, and with a venomous bite. It lived in marshes and in deep pools along rivers, and its presence was enough to poison the water it lived in. If cattle drank the water, they would die.</p> <p>It’s possible that the lavellan was just a story to keep children away from marshy areas and deep water. But it’s also possible that it might be based on a real animal.</p> <p>The name lavellan is the same name used in Scottish Gaelic for the water shrew and water vole. The water shrew is big for a shrew, but small in comparison to a rat, only 4” long, or 10 cm, not counting its long tail. The water shrew does have a venomous bite, but it’s not powerful enough to kill a cow. It eats small fish, snails and small crustaceans, insects, amphibians, and small rodents. The water vole is about twice the length of the water shrew, but with a relatively short tail. It mostly eats plants, although it sometimes also eats frogs and tadpoles. It’s also not venomous.</p> <p>But before we talk any more about the lavellan, we need to learn about the earth hound.</p> <p>The earth hound, or yard pig, is supposed to be a rat-like animal that lives in burrows and is occasionally unearthed when plowing. It’s the one that is supposed to dig into graveyards, break into coffins, and eat the dead bodies.</p> <p>We know more about the earth hound than the lavellan, largely due to a letter in the archives of the Natural Museums of Scotland.</p> <p>The letter was written by a man named Smith of Wartle, who in 1917 wrote to James Ritchie in Edinburgh. Smith’s letter said that the father of a local gardener had dug up an earth hound while plowing in 1867 or thereabouts. The animal bit his boot when he kicked at it, biting so hard that it cut through the leather. The man beat it to death with the plow’s singletree.</p> <p>Smith reported that the animal was dark brown, the size of a ferret but shaped roughly like a rat with a more doglike head, and a bushy tail that was about half the length of a rat’s tail. The head was long and the nostrils piglike, and it had white tusks—probably incisors. And it had feet like a mole’s, which makes sense if it is a burrowing animal.</p> <p>Stories of the ea</p>
