The Fur Animals of Louisiana 63 



"All the members of the marten family, in which are 

 the fishers, martens, skunks, weasels and mink, are savage 

 and merciless. Some of them ; such as the weasel, mink and 

 skunk, are wholesale slaughterers who murder helpless 

 birds by the dozen for the vicious lust of murder. For ex- 

 ample, on two occasions a mink wiped out an entire flock 

 of over twenty gulls, in the New York Zoological Park, in a 

 single killing and without devouring even one. On one 

 estate, in Pennsylvania, one murderous little weasel mur- 

 dered twenty-four ring-necked pheasants in one night. 



"The skunk is the pariah of the class Mammalia, a 

 dangerous and disgusting outcast, and it is a good thing for 

 the world that his pelt is wanted for its fur. May the price 

 of skunk skins never go down until the last skunk has been 

 gathered in! This view, however, will not receive the in- 

 dorsement of those fur dealers who hold that the skunk 

 is so nearly harmless to man that he should be tolerated and 

 encouraged for the sake of his fur. 



"The 'sufferings' of wolverines, weasels, mink and skunk 

 in traps are not so great as they may seem. A marten or 

 a mink will eat a good meal with one foot in a trap. It is a 

 way with the members of the marten family to tear and 

 devour their prey alive, and it is the way of man to catch 

 them in about the only way in which it can be done — in 

 steel traps. We do not believe in any unnecessary cruelty, 

 either in the killing of wild animals or domestic animals, 

 but there is plenty of both. The proper course of human 

 people is to reduce it to an irreducible minimum." 



In comment on the balance of nature in relation to the 

 fur-bearers, Dr. Hornaday, too, pointed out, "that ever 

 since the day of primitive man, and according to their 

 needs, the carnivorous fur-bearers have killed and devoured 

 other vertebrates whenever they could be caught ; and man 

 has killed the fur-bearers to supply his own needs, and our 

 people should not quarrel with these two fundamental laws 

 of nature for they are as fixed and unshakeable as the 

 Rocky Mountains." 



On the other hand, he points out, it is a right good thing 

 that man's needs have caused him to keep down the increase 



