LIMA, Peru (AP) -- Sitting at a restaurant known for its typical Andean dishes, Lilia Chauca puts aside her fork and knife and digs into a plate of guinea pig, fried golden brown.
"You need to eat this with your hands," she says, tearing off a leg.
The guinea pig is a cuddly pet for millions of children in the United States. In Peru, the rodent's birthplace, it remains a vital source of protein in rural communities, a mainstay of Andean folk medicine and a religious sacrifice to the gods.
For more than 25 years, Chauca and her team of researchers at the National Institute of Agrarian Investigation have worked to breed faster growing, plumper, tastier guinea pigs. Peruvians eat 65 million guinea pigs each year, she says.
Chauca says the animals are raised in about 98 percent of rural Andean households in Peru. Often as many as several dozen can be found scampering underfoot by the kitchen stove or are kept in adobe brick enclosures. They are fed alfalfa and vegetable peels.
Guinea pigs also are a common food source in Ecuador's Andes as well as in parts of Bolivia, Colombia and Venezuela.
The animal is high in protein and low in fat and cholesterol and it has a distinctive flavor.
Picking the scant, sinewy meat from the bony carcass invariably requires two hands. It is often served with the head staring up from the plate -- one more element that turns off many foreign tourists.
It is common to find guinea pig served deep fried at roadside stalls in Andean hamlets. On a recent day outside the village of Quinua, foreign tourists were found debating whether to sample one.
"You want that guinea pig without a tail, right?" a vendor joked. In the Peruvian lexicon, guinea pig with a tail is a rat.
Archaeological evidence shows guinea pigs were domesticated in Peru as far back as 2500 B.C., and probably long before that, said Daniel Sandweiss, an archaeologist at the University of Maine.
His excavation in the 1980s in the Chincha Valley, near Peru's central Pacific coast, proved that current ritual healing practices with guinea pigs date back at least to the Inca empire which reached its height in the 1400s before the Spanish conquest.
Peruvians of varying social classes still seek out ritual healers, or "curanderos," who use guinea pigs to diagnose illnesses.
The curandero rubs a guinea pig over the patient's body, then splits the creature down the middle to look for discoloration that is believed to indicate illness in the corresponding organ or body part of the human.
"We use CAT scans, and they use guinea pig scans. That's the idea," Sandweiss said.
In the village of Huasao, a 20-minute drive south of Cuzco, Clemente Villanueva, a third generation curandero, treats bad luck with tipsy guinea pigs.
Grasping a jet-black guinea pig, he forces it to drink a tall glass of beer. The animal's power to remove bad luck is stronger when it is drunk, Villanueva explains as he adorns the glassy-eyed rodent with colored ribbons before rubbing it over a patient.
He says the guinea pig will be set free in the countryside, ribbons and all, but will remain highly contagious with bad luck that will pass to anyone who has the misfortune to cross its path.
A 17th century native chronicler, Guaman Poma de Ayala, wrote that the Incas sacrificed 1,000 white guinea pigs along with 100 llamas in Cuzco's main plaza each July "so that neither the sun nor the waters would harm the food and the fields."
From the beginning of the Spanish colonization, the Catholic Church brutally suppressed Indian religious icons. But the guinea pig was spared.
Geronimo de Loayza, the first bishop of Lima from 1545 to 1575, refused a request by Spanish priests to order the mass extermination of the rodents, fearing it would spark a rebellion.
The Spanish colonizers made Indian artists paint, weave and carve items with Catholic themes to decorate churches and evangelize the natives. The artists copied prints imported from Europe, but added Peruvian touches, creating a unique "Andean baroque" style.
Today, churches in Lima and Cuzco still display Indian depictions of the Last Supper with Jesus and the 12 disciples feasting on roasted guinea pig.