“Actually capybara meat is delicious,” Mr. Lord said in a telephone interview. “It’s more like rabbit than chicken, though when dried with sea salt in Venezuela it acquires a fishy flavor.”

Capybara aficionados include President Hugo Chávez, who grew up in Barinas, a state on Venezuela’s steamy plains where capybaras are common. On his television show, “Hello, President,” Mr. Chávez has promoted capybara empanadas washed down with papaya juice.

Eating rodents is not unheard of elsewhere. In Louisiana the nutria, which resembles a small capybara — but with a tail — finds its way onto dinner plates. Or witness the relish with which diners in Ecuador and Peru savor cuy, or guinea pig. In Caracas chefs have tried elevating capybara to haute cuisine.

Never mind that capybaras have some unusual habits like eating their own feces. And yes, some chefs acknowledge, the methods used to kill capybaras, normally involving a sharp clubbing of the rodent’s head, put off some diners.

“We’re not asking for the capybaras to be put to death while listening to Vivaldi, but something could be done to make the practice less brutal,” said Víctor Moreno, the head chef at the Center for Gastronomic Studies, a Caracas cooking school. “Capybara is an exquisite meat that deserves prominent stature in our culinary tradition.”

It remains more popular in Venezuela’s rural interior than in the capital. Though found from Panama to Argentina, biologists estimate that no more than a few hundred thousand of the animals survive in Venezuela. Most of the capybaras are on large private cattle ranches, where fences and armed guards have curbed illicit hunting.

“The capybara is easier to steal than a cow, so there’s still a bit of thievery that takes place on some ranches,” said Reynaldo Alvarado, 46, the foreman in charge of the capybara hunt at Hato Santa Luisa. Still, he said, some male capybaras can weigh as much as 140 pounds and measure four feet long.