The guinea pig (Cavia porcellus) has been raised and consumed throughout the Andean subregion since before the arrival of Spaniards in America. According to sixteenth-century native chronicler Felipe Guarnan Poma de Ayala, the Incas and the indigenous peoples who preceded them used the guinea pig, or cuy, for ceremonial purposes (Guarnan Poma de Ayala 1980, 55). Hundreds of years later, on the brink of the twenty-first century, mass production of cuys outside their native habitat is turning these animals into an exchange commodity that is generating many economic activities.