Bonnacon!

For the life of me I don’t know how I’ve never heard of the bonnacon before, although it goes back to at least Pliny the Elder who got it from Aristotle. Thanks to John Coulthart, who linked to this Public Domain Review page, thereby finally introducing to my new favourite animal:

When it comes to self-defense, skunks and spitting cobras have nothing on the bonnacon. If threatened, it fled. While fleeing, it defecated. Violently. According to Pliny the Elder, the excrement voided the animal’s body with such explosive force that it could hit targets more than a football pitch away. Contact with its dung was said to burn like a kind of fire, scorching hunting dogs and anyone not equipped with protective gear. (There is some uncertainty whether the weapon was liquid or gaseous, super-heated or acidic.)

Oh, I wish this thing wasn’t mythical. And I couldn’t not use this illustration; the beast looks vaguely regretful at having to do this but equally it refuses not to, while the poor bastard being shat at just has this expression like “fuck, that’s revolting, I’m heading back to the crusade where even the Saracens don’t do this”…