Marten 923 



Poland's lists show that during the seventy-one years, 1821 

 to 1 89 1 inclusive, 2,611,500 skins were taken by the other 

 American companies, an average of 36,781 each year. So that 

 the average annual catch of Marten for fur is about 119,000. 



Marten-farming. 



The supply of Marten has not very seriously diminished, 

 but it has fallen far behind the demand, and the price of the 

 pelt is steadily going up. Realizing that so fine a fur will 

 always find a market, several persons have made attempts 

 at Marten-farming, but so far without success. The animals 

 are hard to get alive, have not hitherto bred in captivity, 

 and are so murderously quarrelsome among themselves that 

 if half a dozen Marten be put in a large cage, only one, 

 the strongest, will be left alive in a very few weeks. Two 

 of my trapper friends, Staley and Leeds, of Idaho, found 

 this out to their cost when they turned several choice speci- 

 mens loose in a large barn; although they had food, room, 

 and nesting places in abundance, one only survived the 

 first month. These trappers also caught an old male and 

 a young female and put them together in an 8-by-io-foot 

 cage during my sojourn, September, 1902. They quar- 

 relled day and night, and a week later the female was killed 

 by her companion. 



The first lesson to be drawn is clear. This wholesale 

 big-cage-plan has not succeeded with any species, and is least 

 of all likely to do so with Martens. Separate cages, judicious 

 management with selection of the gentler individuals, would 

 doubtless solve the breeding problem and open the way to 

 successfully raising them for their fur, just as similar methods 

 have succeeded with the Fox. 



While no one so far as I can learn has ever bred the 

 American Marten in captivity, its near kinsman, the British 

 Marten, has been successfully managed by A. H. Cocks, of 

 Henley-on-Thames, England, and a careful study of his re- 

 sults published in the "Zoologist" (1881, p. ^;^^; 1883, p. 203; 



