POLECAT 49 



POLECAT OR FOUMART. 



MUSTELA PUTORIUS L. 



Seldom have the processes of extermination worked more 

 rapidly and effectually than in the present case. Formerly 

 abundant and generally distributed in the district, the Polecat 

 has for many years been practically extinct, even in the more 

 outlying localities. From the day that steel-traps came into 

 vogue for the capture of the Rabbit, the fate of the Polecat 

 in the lowlands was sealed. 



The frequency with which it is mentioned, without any 

 qualifying remarks, in the volumes of the " Old Statistical 

 Account " is excellent evidence that it was a common animal 

 in many localities, if not indeed in all, up to the closing years 

 of last century. For thirty or forty years more it was still 

 well known, but its numbers had been terribly thinned in the 

 interval, and by about 1850 it had practically ceased to exist 

 within our limits, so that the subsequent appearance of an 

 example here and there has always been regarded as an 

 exceptional event, and very likely some of these have merely 

 been escaped Ferrets. Even the memory of it is fast dying 

 out, and comparatively few of the keepers I have questioned 

 can give me any information regarding it. Neill, in his 

 Newhall list (1808), and again in his Tweeddale list (1815), 

 includes the "Polecat or fitchet" without remark, but 

 neither Stark (1834) nor Rhind (1836) mentions it among 

 the animals to be found in the immediate neighbourhood of 

 Edinburgh; while MacGillivray, writing in 1838, speaks of it 

 as " of rare occurrence in the more cultivated tracts." Game- 

 keepers who have known some of the largest estates in 

 Midlothian and East Lothian for more than half a century, 



