Creative Commons/Rich Anderson.

A man allegedly attacked a Pleasant Grove woman with a frozen armadillo in late September, Dallas’s Fox 4 News reported, reminding us again that basically anything can be turned into a weapon. The news ricocheted around the Internet, as weird animal stories tend to do, making BoingBoing and newspaper websites as far away as Australia.

The Fox 4 story, based on a police statement, said the woman had met her alleged attacker to sell him an armadillo when he turned on her and began hitting her with the carcass. Ida Greshen, the woman injured in the alleged attack, gave a different account of the September 29 incident when tracked down by Eat My Words last week. Dallas Police did not return a call for comment on the incident.

Greshen, 57, said that her alleged attacker, a former flame whom she has known for thirty years, had been storing two dead armadillos in her freezer, preserving them until he could cook them. “I had the armadillo in my icebox,” she said.

Greshen said that on the day of the alleged attack, she did not want to return the armadillo carcasses to the man because he had not repaid her $250 she had loaned him. A tussle ensued in the parking lot of the senior community where Greshen lives, she said, and they both were tugging at the armadillo before he began to hit her with it.

“He took it and hit me with it,” Greshen said. “He went berserk. He had fire in his eyes like he wanted to kill me.” He hit her on the leg and breast, leaving both areas bruised and swollen, Greshen said. The armadillo, which had been removed from its shell (husked?), “wasn’t frozen solid but it was big enough and hard enough to bruise my leg,” she said.

Perhaps more interesting than the attack itself is the story of how armadillos got in Greshen’s freezer in the first place—and the glimpse it affords us into the world of unconventional game meats. The armadillos were not the only type of critter Greshen had on ice—the man also kept the occasional possum or raccoon in her apartment. The man would come over to her house to marinate and cook them because his gas had been cut off, she said.

“I let him cook his ‘coon; I let him cook any kind of wild stuff he thinks he likes,” Greshen said, adding she has never tried the meat herself. “He’s a country boy.” (more…)

Tagged: Armadillo meat, Barbacoa de Armadillo, dallas, dillo, game, opossum, possum, raccoon