HAMLYN'S MENAGERIE MAGAZINE. 
Hamlytt's Jlfattagme Jttaga^tiw. 
Published on the 15th of each month. 
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The Editor will be glad to receive for publication articles 
and all interesting photo6, the imports and exports of all 
stock, and foreign adventures with all wild stock. 
porarily, in those who get a few drops of it in 
their eyes. Coves cites the case of several Indians 
who went blind after an accident of this kind, and 
Andubon and Bachman speak of dogs which took 
more than a week to recover after receiving a 
discharge of this terrible secretion in their faces. 
The beast, however, does not bring its battery into 
action without good reason, and tame Skunks, 
which have nothing to fear from those who look 
after them, can be handled without inconvenience. 
The carrying companies in the United States and 
Canada, however, refuse to take live Skunks if 
they have not been disarmed by an operation which 
is now commonly practised, in order to prevent 
the animals from polluting goods with which they 
might come in contact. 
It has long been believed that the odoriferous 
discharge of the Skunk was the urine, but it has 
finally be realised that it was only the product of 
certain glands with which almost all the Weasel 
family are provided, and which in the Skunk are 
particularly well-developed. These glands, which, 
to speak exactly, are small pouches, are two in 
number, placed one on each side of the anus, 
and open into the rectum by a little red nipple 
which in repose is hidden behind the sphincter 
muscle. When the Skunk wishes to use them, it 
turns its tail over its back and the nipples are 
protruded outside, pointed towards the enemy 
like a 75 gun through an embrasure. The mus- 
cular coat of the pouches contracts, and the fluid 
is ejected as a fine spray with such force that it 
covers an area of three or four metres, while its 
scent spreads much further than that. The fully- 
charged pouches, which can work independently 
of each other, can each discharge at least half-a- 
dozen times. 
There are several means of silencing this bat- 
tery. The nipple can be simply cut with scissors, 
or the duct between the pouch and the nipple can 
be divided. The healing process closes the outlet 
of the discharge. The removal of the pouches is 
a more radical measure, but this operation is a 
more delicate one, and in detaching the pouch 
from its muscular envelope with the buttonhook 
used for this operation, care must be taken not 
to interfere with the rectum, to which the whole 
apparatus is closely attached. After being bathed 
a few times with antiseptics, the wound closes up 
in a few days; but it is necessary to operate on 
very young animals, about three weeks old — that 
is to say, just when their eyes have opened, but 
before they have any fur. On grown-up animals 
over a year old the operation may have serious 
results, and only a third of them recover. 
Some breeders do not agree with this disarm- 
ing operation, which they think useless, since a 
Skunk brought up in captivity and used to its 
surroundings never discharges its pestilential fluid 
unless scared by a dog or under apprehension of 
danger, and the men working on the farms can 
pick up their charges by the tail without them 
shewing the least resentment. I even have before 
me the photograph of a pretty American lady 
with a Skunk on her knees, but her expression is 
not exactly one of confidence ! 
When the Skunks have attained their full 
development comes the question of harvesting the 
furs which have been the object of all this diplo- 
matic solicitude. The fur is in its full beauty 
from December to March, and this is the season 
when the animals are killed, either by suffocating 
them in a box filled with illuminating gas or with 
ether and chloriform vapour, or by drowning, 
bearing in mind that any severe or long-continued 
suffering may endanger the beauty of the fur. 
Then the animal must be skinned by a definite 
method, to meet the requirements of the trade. 
The incision in the skin is made between the hind 
legs, along the underside of the tail, and the skin 
is peeled forward towards the head, making a 
case which is put to dry, hair inside, on a shape 
or stretcher made of a board cut so as not to 
stretch the skin, which would make the fur thin. 
The skin of the United States Skunk is of a 
fine and more or less deep black; it has a white 
streak down the middle of the snout, joining a 
wide white cap from which run two white stripes 
which extend more or less in a fork to the rump, 
sometimes right up to the root of the tail, which 
ends in a white tuft. The development of these 
white markings is very variable; sometimes they 
are barely indicated, sometimes they meet at the 
root of the tail or fuse and run up it; sometimes 
all these markings run into each other almost 
from their origin, and the animal has the back 
and the whole tail quite white. The demand in 
the trade being before everything for the black 
furs, all the efforts of the breeder are directed to- 
wards eliminating the white from his stock by 
rigorous selection, which means only using the 
darkest animals for breeding. In this way have 
been obtained furs entirely black or with imper- 
ceptible markings only. The breeder sorts these 
furs into four grades, designated by the commer- 
cial bureau for encouraging Skunk-farming by 
the letters A, B, C, 1). The rare all-black skins, 
along with those whose only marking is a little 
slar on the forehead, are called starred skins, and 
