82 FOOD 



mongooses attack and devour live snakes, even the most 

 venomous. They have been introduced into certain West 

 Indian Islands with a view to keeping down snakes, but the 

 introduction has not been entirely a success. The mongoose 

 seems to escape the fangs of the snake by his unusual activity, 

 and possibly he is slightly immune from snake poison. One 

 species, however, lives almost entirely on frogs and crabs. 



Fig. 29. The Common Skunk, Mephitis mephitica. 



The skunk Avith its vile smell is valued for its fur and there 

 is now more than one skunk-farm in England. 



The follo\Adng account of the food of a fox is taken from 

 Miss Frances Pitt's Woodland Creatures: 



Wherever we meet with the fox it is a wild animal, fearing and 

 shunning man and all his works, a hunter of rabbits, birds, and mice, 

 a raider of poultry-yards, and sometimes in mountainous districts a 

 slayer of young lambs. It is rarely that the lowland foxes commit the 

 latter crime, it takes an old hill fox to do it. The average fox of our 



