In the heart of Cusco Cathedral hangs an iconic oil painting by Marcos Zapata (also known as Marcos Sapaca Inca) depicting the Last Supper (Figure 1). On the table in front of them is laid out a sumptuous banquet, consisting of corn or chicha beer, potatoes, peppers and a freshly roasted guinea pig. Zapata’s Andean Last Supper registers the exchange of cultures, foods and animals in the New World and highlights one of its most ubiquitous components: the humble guinea pig, or cuy. A common dish in the Andes, as well as a frequent sacrificial animal, the guinea pig was one of just three domesticated mammals in pre-Colombian South America (along with the llama and the alpaca). In the world beyond the Andes, the guinea pig emerged as a global animal, gracing houses (though not usually tables) across early modern Europe and becoming, in time, a popular pet and laboratory subject. Today it is widely consumed in Africa and Asia as well.

Domesticated around 5000 BC, the cuy (Cavia porcellus) was often kept in homes or in nearby pens or pits and consumed on a regular basis. Twenty-three well-preserved individuals have been excavated at Cahuachi, a major ceremonial centre for the Nazca culture, while guinea pig pens have been identified at Chan Cauchi, the capital of the Chimú empire. The Quechua name quwi or cuy is an onomatopoeia that registers the high-pitched squeaks and skittish nature of the animal. According to the erudite Jesuit missionary Bernabé Cobo (1582–1657), who lived for more than 50 years in Peru and Mexico in the early 17th century, ‘The Indians eat this animal with the skin on, only peeling it off as if it were a piglet, and it is for them very tasty food … [T]hey usually make it into a stew, having removed the belly, with a lot of pepper and smooth pebbles from the river, which they call calapurca, which means in the Aymara language “belly stones”, because in this stew they put the said pebbles in the belly of the cuy’.¹ Such culinary preparation of the cuy continues today throughout the Andean region and beyond.

In addition to eating the cuy, Andean peoples have long sacrificed them in propitiation rites, often extracting their entrails to divine the future. The Jesuit natural historian José de Acosta, writing of the Incas, recounted that ‘in their sacrifices they used to offer these cuyes very frequently’.² The Jesuit-trained Andean chronicler Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala wrote that in the month of Chacra Yapuy Quilla (August), the Incas sacrificed ‘cuuies [guinea pigs] and uacas [Spondylus shells] … and chichi [maize beer] and carneros [llamas]’.³ Cobo reported that ‘they [the Indians] frequently take advantage of these little animals to determine the success of things in the future, opening them up and looking inside them for certain signs’.⁴ Ethnographic studies describe a still-common method for diagnosing maladies that entails rubbing a live cuy over the body of the patient then slitting it open to see which of its organs exhibits signs of discolouration.

The Old World first encountered the Peruvian cuy in the 16th century. A curious gift of the Columbian exchange of peoples, cultures, plants, animals and microbes that marked the first age of globalisation, the Spanish called the animals conejo de Indias (‘rabbit of the Indies’), the French cochons d’Inde (pigs of the Indies) and the Portuguese porquinho-da-índia (piggies of the Indies); in Mandarin Chinese the cuy was called tún shˇu. The infamous English term, ‘guinea pig’, is of uncertain origin. One theory holds that ‘guinea’ referred to the original price, while another suggests that it registers the history of the slave trade that brought the furry creatures to British shores – hence the mistaken belief that they originated in West Africa. A third theory asserts that ‘guinea’ is a corruption of Guyana in northern South America, in the 16th century spelled ‘Guiana’, whence the animals may have been shipped across the Atlantic.

We may trace the guinea pig’s global career via representations of the animal in art. Jan Brueghel’s The Feast of Bacchus (c.1640) represents two multicoloured guinea pigs nibbling on a pea pod (Figure 2). Teodor Lubieniecki’s Still Life with Guinea Pigs (late 17th century) depicts two of the animals peering at a basket of fruit, while Albert Eckhout’s portrait of a Brazilian mameluca (1641) has a pair of guinea pigs emerging from the undergrowth, possibly as a sign of fertility. Other notable guinea pig artworks include a miniature by Flemish artist David de Coninck, which features two plump cuyes sniffing a bunch of grapes; Felice Boselli’s Still Life with a Pigeon and Guinea Pig (c.1690), which shows a guinea pig examining a piece of fruit; and Jakab Bogdány’s Capuchin Squirrel Monkey, Two Guinea Pigs, a Blue Tit and an Amazon St Vincent Parrot with Peaches, Figs and Pears in a Landscape (1710–20), in which two inquisitive guinea pigs inspect a pear. One portrait of three children by an unknown artist depicts a seven-year-old girl cradling a podgy cuy in her arms, while a boy next to her clutches a bird. Dated around 1580, this is believed to be the oldest English representation of a guinea pig and suggests the early adoption of the animal among elites as a pet. It is notable that in many of these paintings, guinea pigs are portrayed in the act of eating.

In the Viceroyalty of Peru, the cuy retained its ritual or sacrificial uses and continued to feature in religious ceremonies, despite efforts on the part of some church officials to suppress such practices. Writing in the late 16th century, Mercedarian friar Martín de Murúa complained that cuyes were still used clandestinely in divination and remained a commonplace source of food in Andean dwellings.⁵ Several decades later, in 1621, Padre Pablo José de Arriaga condemned the surreptitious use of the animals ‘not only in sacrifices, but for divination and medicine’, describing how the Indians ‘sometimes open [the animals up] with a thumbnail’ and sometimes ‘drown them in a bowl of water, holding the head under until they die’ and opening them ‘from top to bottom’. Arriaga remarked that ‘if it were possible to exterminate them, it would be a good thing, but everyone keeps them in their houses, and they multiply so quickly that they can even be found in Rome, where I was very surprised to see them being sold publicly’.⁶ It is the centrality of the cuy to the Andean diet and religious belief that explains its appearance in Marcos Zapata’s mid 18th-century painting of the Last Supper in Cusco Cathedral.

By the 18th century, the cuy or conejo de indias was the object of growing interest among Hispanic natural historians. Spanish botanist Hipólito Ruiz, who lived in Peru between 1777 and 1788, remarked on the widespread presence of ‘coyes or cuyes’ in Huánuco and other Peruvian cities, noting that ‘wherever guinea pigs are bred, there is always a tremendous plague of minute fleas, unbearable because of their bites’.⁷ The vogue for collecting things monstrous was reflected in the observations of the Jesuit naturalist Juan de Velasco, who commented on the malformed cuy specimens that he observed in his native Quito. One animal had ‘two heads joined by a single neck’, another ‘one head and neck and all the rest duplicated’, a third ‘two bodies up to the waist, from there only one’ and a fourth ‘two complete bodies, linked only by the back’.⁸

Following the establishment of the Real Gabinete de Historia Natural in Madrid in 1772, colonial bureaucrats also started to ship man-made (artificialia) and natural (naturalia) specimens to Madrid for analysis and exhibition, adding to a growing royal collection founded and directed by the Guayaquil-born Peruvian Creole Pedro Franco Dávila (see ‘Creole Cabinet’ in this volume). The viceroy of New Granada, Manuel Antonio Flórez, dispatched three large boxes containing ‘86 species of plants, well dried and preserved between pieces of paper … two well-preserved monkeys’ and ‘part of a feather from the wing of a condor’.⁹ The governor of Santa Marta sent ‘a bat caught in his own house and two sea horses’, while the governor of Guayaquil donated ‘a live caiman in a box’, ‘a tiger [jaguar] cub’ and ‘a little monkey the colour of cinnamon’.¹⁰ Guinea pigs were among the many natural history specimens that made their way into the Real Gabinete of Franco Dávila, taking their place alongside the West Indian anteater and the East Indian elephant. In 1789 the bishop of Trujillo, Baltasar Jaime Martínez Compañón, sent 24 boxes of stuffed animals, plants and artefacts to the Real Gabinete, including three ceramic Chimú stirrup jars (Figure 3), a stuffed ‘ginger guinea pig, male’ and an illustration noting key anatomical features.¹¹ Painted by one of Martínez Compañón’s unidentified Peruvian artists, the latter features a view of the rodent’s mouth, revealing its large incisors, and a close-up of the ear bones, considered to bring good luck if ingested (Figure 4). The fact that Martínez Compañón’s Peruvian collection included both live guinea pigs and human representations of the animals responded to specific royal instructions for collecting and reflected the naturalia/artificialia division then prevalent in natural history cabinets.

Guinea pigs have gained a truly global foothold in the modern world, although in a variety of different ways. In Europe, the animals increasingly assumed a role, first as an elite mascot and then a popular pet, with growing numbers of the species inhabiting European homes from the mid 19th century onward. One writer in the RSPCA’s monthly magazine, The Animal World, recommended the guinea pig as an ideal pet for children, since ‘its appetite is unbounded and no matter how much it may eat it never appears to be at all unwell in consequence’.¹² Another, the Reverend C.G. Blaydes, rhapsodised over the intelligence of his parishioner’s guinea pig, which ‘will sit up for things, particularly orange-peel, of which it is very fond when dried’; a third bought a ‘guinea pig companion’ for his pet marmoset (another itinerant American animal).¹³ An 1886 manual entitled The Guinea Pig, or Domestic Cavy, for Food, Fur and Fancy advocated breeding guinea pigs for show and even eating them in cavy ragouts, cavy curries and cavy pies. Consuming guinea pigs as meat never really caught on in Britain, but the animals have become common in laboratories – hence the colloquial use of the term ‘guinea pig’ to mean test subject.

Beyond Europe, guinea pigs have made their mark in Asia and Africa, where they have been adopted as both pet and food source. In Japan, where guinea pigs were likely introduced by the Dutch East India Company, they are called morumotto (Dutch for ‘marmot’) and have become popular pets and even fashion icons. Maki Yamada’s Guinea Pig Fashion store in Tokyo sells tank tops, tuxedos, wigs, hats and kimonos for guinea pigs and ships its products around the world.

In Africa, guinea pigs are more commonly reared for food, and their farming has been promoted by conservationists as a sustainable alternative to bushmeat. A national livestock census revealed that there were an estimated 600,000 guinea pigs in Tanzania in 2008, while there are thought to be around two million in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. African farmers also value guinea pigs for their manure, which is higher in nitrogen than manure from other livestock.

In contemporary South America cuyes continue to be bred for food, with an estimated 65,000 guinea pigs eaten annually in Peru alone. The cuy is also consumed very widely in Ecuador and Bolivia, as well as southern Colombia and northern Argentina and Chile. Many of these animals are reared in individual households, like these cuyes photographed at the Pisac Market near Cusco (Figure 5). Many, however, are farmed in large breeding facilities. Since 2013, Peru has observed National Cuy Day (the second Friday in October) to promote the breeding and consumption of this native animal, and the town of Huacho, north of Lima, hosts a cuy festival every July, which includes cuy fashion competitions and cuy races (the contestants are eaten afterwards). Chinese immigrants to Peru have also given a new twist to traditional cuy dishes, with restaurants in Lima’s Chinatown serving sweet-and-sour guinea pig fried in oyster sauce.

Eaten, sacrificed, fashioned from clay, represented in art and adopted as a pet, the tiny cuy or guinea pig has developed an impressive global career.

FURTHER READING

Acosta, J. (2002) Natural and Moral History of the Indies [1589], edited by J. Mangan, translated by F. López-Morillas (Durham, NC: Duke University Press).

Asúa, M., and R. French (2005) A New World of Animals: Early Modern Europeans on the Creatures of Iberian America (Aldershot, Hampshire: Ashgate Publishing).

Crosby, A. (1972) The Columbian Exchange: Biological and Cultural Consequences of 1492 (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press).

Cumberland, C. (1886) The Guinea Pig, or Domestic Cavy, for Food, Fur and Fancy (London: L. Upcott Gill).

Defrance, S. (2006) ‘The sixth toe: the modern culinary role of the guinea pig in southern Peru’, Food and Foodways, 14 (1): 3–34.

Few, M., and Z. Tortorici (eds.) (2014) Centering Animals in Latin American History (Durham, NC: Duke University Press).

Gade, D. (1967) ‘The guinea pig in Andean folk culture’, Geographical Review, 57 (2): 213–24.

Maas, B. (2019) ‘Why more people in Africa should farm guinea pigs for food’, The Conversation, https://theconversation.com/why-more-people-in-africa-should-farm-guinea-pigs-for-food-108477.

Morales, E. (1994) ‘The guinea pig in the Andean economy: from household animal to market commodity’, Latin American Research Review, 29 (3), 129–42.

Parker Brienen, R. (2006) Visions of Savage Paradise: Albert Eckhout, Court Painter in Colonial Dutch Brazil (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press).

Sandweiss, D., and E. Wing (1997) ‘Ritual rodents: the guinea pigs of Chincha, Peru’, Journal of Field Archaeology, 24 (1): 47–58.

Yamamoto, D. (2015) Guinea Pig (London: Reaktion Books).

¹ B. Cobo, Historia del Nuevo Mundo (Seville: Imprenta de E. Rasco, 1890), vol. 2, 307.

² J. de Acosta, Natural and Moral History of the Indies, J. Mangan, ed., F. López-Morillas, trans. (Durham, NC: 2002), 240.

³ F. Guaman Poma, ‘August: month of the turning of the soil’, El Nuevo Corónica y Buen Gobierno (1615), Royal Library of Copenhagen, shelfmark GKS 2252 4, 253.

⁴ Cobo, Historia del Nuevo Mundo, 307.

⁵ M. de Murúa, Historia general del Perú (Madrid: Dastin, 2001), 408–9.

⁶ Pablo José de Arriaga, Extirpación de la idolatria del Perú (Lima, 1621), 25.

⁷ Hipólito Ruíz, The Journals of Hipólito Ruíz, Spanish Botanist Peru and Chile 1777–1788, R.E. Schultes and M.J. Nemry von Thenen de Jaramillo-Arango, trans. (Portland, 1998), 143.

⁸ Juan de Velasco, Historia del reino de Quito en la América Meridional, (Quito, 1841), vol. 1, pt 1, 133.

⁹ AGI Indiferente 1549.

¹⁰ Museo Nacional de Ciencias Naturales, Fondo Museo, Sección A – Real Gabinete, legajo 171; AGI Indiferente 1549.

¹¹ Museo Nacional de Ciencias Naturales, Fondo Museo, Sección A – Real Gabinete, legajo 73. For a detailed appraisal of the Bishop’s work, see E.B. Soule, The Bishop’s Utopia (Philadelphia: Penn State University Press, 2014).

¹² The Animal World, ‘Guinea pigs’, July 1888, 110; The Bazaar, 21 October 1905, 1, 639.

¹³ The Animal World, ‘An interesting pet’, June 1883, 86.