28 Adams, On the Mole {Talpa eiiropced). 



It would move about a " mole town " till it had located a 

 mole working, and then quickly scratch out the animal, 

 play with it, throw it up in the air, roll on it when it fell, 

 and amuse itself thus till its victim died ; but it never 

 shook them as it did rats, nor did it ever attempt to eat 

 them. My friend Mr. C. E. Wright had a dog which 

 used to bring home moles which it had caught. 



Sir Thomas Boughie, of Aqualate, tells me that foxes 

 sometimes dig out moles and eat them, and a mole-catcher 

 once told me that foxes carry away dead moles. Cadet 

 de Vaux asserts that the fox extracts young moles from 

 their nest, and takes them to feed its own young. 

 Another mole-catcher informed me that pigs will eat dead 

 moles — but then pigs will eat anything ! The same man 

 has known badgers dig up traps and eat the dead moles 

 out of them. 



In the Globe, Feb., 1901, a correspondent says : — 

 " Few people have realised that the hedgehog is a 

 liberal consumer of moles.'' I am certainly one of 

 the many who do not realise the fact, though I 

 presume the writer had some reason for what he 

 wrote. In May, 1901, I kept a fine large hedgehog 

 in an empty fowl-house. One day I gave it the 

 entrails of a freshly caught mole which were devoured 

 during the night. A {qw; days afterwards I placed a 

 freshly caught dead mole in his way and gave him nothing 

 else to eat. I found by marks on the sanded floor that 

 during the night he had dragged the mole all over the 

 place, but had not penetrated the skin. I then supplied a 

 freshly caught mole which I had been dissecting, which 

 had the belly slit open. I found next morning the skin 

 of this turned inside out with every particle of flesh and 

 bone gone up to the tip of the snout, with the paws and 

 tail attached. I tried, in turn, fresh dead moles entire 



