60 THE FUR TRADE OF AMERICA 



fence, or berries help ; for foxes, martens and mink all like a flesh 

 diet mixed with vegetable or fruit rations ; and the skin shows sheen 

 from such mixed diet. It is notorious in the North where the 

 weasel family have to live on fish and mice and ground moles and 

 birds only — owing to frost or floods winter killing the berries — 

 that the fur has not as fine a sheen as in seasons when blueberries 

 and wild cranberries and raspberries supply a balanced diet; just 

 as it is well known in seasons when a curious scourge carries off* the 

 rabbit, the lynx fur may be thick and heavy, but has neither the 

 sheen nor the softness of a winter when the flesh hunters have full 

 fed stomachs. To those kindly souls, who deprecate trapping, 

 I would call attention to the words "flesh hunters" and all the 

 cruelty in wild life so implied. Run over the varieties of the 60 

 fur-bearing animals known to the trade ! You can count on your 

 two hands those that are not flesh eaters, whose very life does not 

 depend on the ravenous tooth and claw. All this cruelty, fur 

 farming obviates, if it does not abolish. Death comes with a quick 

 blow, a silent shot, tongs that break the neck at a clip quick as the 

 instruments of an operating surgeon, or in the case of small animals, 

 chloroform in a painless death. 



It hardly needs telling that post holes for a fur farm must be 

 four to five feet deep and the wood treated with creosote to prevent 

 rotting. You can't afford a wobbly fence with nine pups inside 

 worth all the way from #1800 for the young males to #10,000 for 

 a perfectly marked mother. 



In the very centre of the runway should be the keeper's house. 

 The size of the pens varies all the way from one-quarter of an acre 

 up and down ; but always the wild animal to live naturally must 

 have ranging ground. Details of the fox houses vary on every 

 ranch, but the entrance runway must be long enough to imitate 

 a burrow and large enough to avoid rubbing the shoulders and 

 rump of the fox passing in and out. Before the litter comes, the 

 mates should be separated but put in adjoining pens where they 

 can be company to each other through the fence. Special feeding 



