The Little Armored One

Traveling from West Texas to the East, I was surprised to see armadillos in Tennessee. When did they move into Tennessee? It turns out they arrived in central Tennessee around 2007.

The nine-banded armadillo was first recorded in Texas in 1849 and did not cross the Mississippi River until the early 1940s. This makes it a relative newcomer to the United States. Apparently, the armadillo has expanded about 10 times faster than what is expected of mammals. Since 1849, it has expanded as far north as Illinois and east to the Carolinas.

The armadillo, with its armored shell, claws and pointy nose, has been difficult to categorize since early times. Early Spanish explorers in the 1500s gave it the name “armadillo,” which literally translates from Spanish as “little armored one.” In Central Mexico, the Nahuatl term for the animal was ayotochtli/ayotochin, literally “turtle or tortoise-rabbit,” from ayotl for “turtle” and tochtli or tochin for “rabbit.”

In its Linnaean classification, it is a mammal. Among mammals, it belongs to the superorder Xenarthra, made up of armadillos, sloths and anteaters—a perhaps surprising association.

Within the superorder, the sole surviving order for armadillos is Cingulata, which is comprised of armadillos and some of their extinct relatives. Within the order, there are only two families. Within one of those families, Dasypodidae, there is only one living genus. And within that genus, only one species is present in North America—the nine-banded armadillo, or long-nosed armadillo, Dasypus novemcinctus.

However, in 2024, a DNA study concluded that the nine-banded armadillo is actually made up of four genetically distinct species, rather than subspecies.

Since the armadillo is a relative newcomer to the United States, Indigenous stories about the animal come from South America. A Mayan origin story tells of an underworld deity who turns his footstools into armadillos. The armadillos jump up and knock over two visiting deities, then scamper away to become the progenitors of all armadillos.

This story crosses over many Indigenous societies in the Southern Hemisphere, where armadillos that live in underground tunnels play a role in the underworld.

Regulating the Migrating Armadillo in the United States

There is a patchwork of regulations covering the trade or possession of live and dead armadillos.

Given the migration rate and expanding range of the armadillo, you might expect the National Park Service to have some federal regulation of the animal. Instead, armadillos are regulated differently from state to state.

Only when the Lacey Act is applied does federal law come into play. The law covers interstate trade in armadillos when state law criminalizes such activity.

States that regulate armadillos generally take three approaches: trade, hunting and pest designation.

Trade. Texas Parks & Wildlife Code § 63.103(a) provides that no person may sell or possess a living armadillo for sale, with exceptions for zoos, permitted educational and research institutions, and dealers reselling to those buyers.

The law authorizes a peace officer with probable cause to seize an animal and hold it for rabies or other communicable-disease observation. The animal may be released if it is healthy or destroyed if it is diseased, at the expense of the violator. In state law, this violation is a Class B misdemeanor.

However, Texas permits commercial dealers to possess, transport, purchase, sell, import and export dead armadillos.

Georgia regulates armadillos similarly. It is unlawful to possess live coyotes, armadillos, groundhogs and beavers, with exceptions for scientific research, wildlife exhibition and rehabilitation.

Hunting. There are no hunting seasons for armadillos in Texas, North Carolina, Georgia or South Carolina. Hunting is permitted year-round.

In North Carolina, the armadillo is a nongame species with no closed season or bag limit. Nuisance animals may be trapped during the November-February regulated trapping season or taken under a depredation permit.

Georgia affirmatively makes armadillos fair game, providing that it is unlawful to take nongame wildlife except for coyotes, armadillos, groundhogs, beavers and a short list of others.

Pest designation. Louisiana notably names armadillos as “outlaw quadrupeds,” alongside feral hogs and coyotes. Hunters with permits may take them year-round during legal shooting hours. Landowners or their agents can take them at night during legal shooting hours. On private property, armadillos may be taken with repeating shotguns holding more than three shells and from a moving land vehicle.

Florida designates armadillos as nuisance wildlife. Any landowner may take nuisance wildlife, or authorize another person to do so, by any method not on the prohibited list. No Gun and Light at Night Permit is required for armadillo, wild hog, coyote or commensal rodents. Nuisance wildlife captured alive must be euthanized within 24 hours.

Designating the armadillo as nuisance wildlife or a pest, or allowing hunting with no seasons or limits, means not only that armadillos are unprotected, but that they are targeted for extermination.

They are not on any state endangered species list or international endangered species list.

The Pet Trade

Armadillos are regulated as wildlife, but when kept as pets, if permitted under state wildlife law, they can also fall under public-health regulations.

Texas is one of the few states with overtly public-health-driven wildlife provisions concerning armadillos, and those provisions are aimed at rabies in a commercial sale context.

In addition to rabies, nine-banded armadillos are naturally infected with Mycobacterium leprae, the bacterium that causes leprosy. They have been identified as a source of zoonotic transmission of leprosy in Texas, Louisiana, Alabama, Georgia and Florida.

Meanwhile, the documented exposure pathways—hunting, handling, butchering and eating the animal—are legal, unlicensed and mostly unlimited with regard to killing armadillos in the states discussed above.

So nothing regulates the conduct—hunting, handling, butchering or eating armadillos—that can actually transmit the organism.

Since the armadillo was designated by the Texas Legislature as the state small mammal in 1995, it is only right to allow it to be kept as a pet.

The law says the armadillo “possesses many remarkable and unique traits,” including characteristics that parallel those that distinguish a true Texan, such as “a deep respect and need for the land, the ability to change and adapt, and a fierce undying love for freedom.”

Having some of the tenacious characteristics of Texans, the armadillo certainly seems to fit the state. That said, while it may be kept as a pet, live armadillos cannot be sold in Texas.

Final Thoughts

Armadillos are literally fair game.

They have no broad protections under state or federal law, and there are few protections governing methods of killing them. They may or may not be regulated by animal cruelty statutes, which generally do not regulate depredation.

They could be pets, but as wildlife, keeping them as pets may require a permit or depend on an exception under state law.

They are actually pretty docile creatures, with the exception of their random jumping when startled.

The armadillo defies not only biological clarity through its classification and new DNA analyses, but also legal clarity through a state-by-state assortment of approaches to its management.

Given that the armadillo is not truly an invasive species brought by humans, but instead has naturally expanded into newer regions of North America over the past 150 years, many of these regulatory mechanisms may be a regulatory misfit—rules designed to regulate predators, invasive species and dangerous animals rather than a naturally migrating species.

Long live the armadillo.

To read more articles by Professor Sutton go to:  https://profvictoria.substack.com/ 

Professor Victoria Sutton (Lumbee) is a law professor on the faculty of Texas Tech University. In 2005, Sutton became a founding member of the National Congress of American Indians, Policy Advisory Board to the NCAI Policy Center, positioning the Native American community to act and lead on policy issues affecting Indigenous communities in the United States.

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