Don’t mess with an American’s pet. Just don’t do it. And if that pet happens to be a swamp rat, you’ll arouse some ragin’ Cajuns.

The tale of Neuty, the pet nutria, was all over the news in Louisiana in mid-March. For the uninitiated, nutria look a lot like beavers, except with big, ugly rat tails instead of beavers’ broad, flat appendages. Unlike beavers, though, they are generally hated. Native to South America but brought to Louisiana in the 1930s for their fur, they escaped into the marshes and began destroying wetlands at a furious pace. They eat vast amounts of aquatic vegetation, including the roots that otherwise would keep the soil in place, and they even destroyed large parts of the drainage system in Jefferson Parish, Louisiana. A local news article described them as “about as desirable as cockroaches and cottonmouth [poisonous snakes].”