210 
FOREST AND STREAM 
up such an incessant din of chewing, gnawing, 
scratching—all the while making a peculiar whin¬ 
ing sound like that of a young bate—that even 
a deaf person cannot overlook. And should you 
be camping in a tent and not get up after this 
villain Mr. Hedgehog won’t hesitate to crawl un¬ 
der the canvas and poke his cold, moist, foul¬ 
smelling nose right against your face. Whether 
he will go further than this or not I do not 
know as I have never heard of any one permit¬ 
ting him to bite them. An ordinary individual, 
however, is apt to awake with a start when a 
cold hedgehog proboscis is poked into his face, 
and the first impulse is to throw out your hand 
and get it full of quills. Then you start in to 
slay the intruder. Unless you can shoot him in the 
head it is next to useless to fill him with lead. 
He will just grunt and carry away a whole body 
full of pistol bullets. He is one of the toughest 
“critters” to kill to be found in our woods. The 
best and most humane way of despatching him 
is with a good stout club, hitting over and from 
the rear and right between the eyes. One blow 
of this kind will do the trick, but if you maul 
him on the body he will roll up into a ball, put 
his nose out of the way and wait for you to be¬ 
come exhausted with your blows, then he will get 
up and walk off. 
Personally, I am strongly opposed to wantonly 
killing any wild creature without good and suffi¬ 
cient reasons for so doing, and I attempt to live 
up to this doctrine at all times, but just where 
the hedgehog fits in the scheme of Nature I have 
been unable to determine, and I know he is the 
worst pest that we have in our New England 
forests. Aside from his annoyance to transient 
campers he does an enormous amount of damage 
to the most valuable timber and buildings, and 
no campers’ cabins can remain standing in the 
woods without special protection from this in¬ 
truder, and I believe he ought to be exterminated. 
Can any Forest and Stream reader suggest any 
good that is done by the Canada porcupine or 
hedgehog? 
Romance and Reality in Fur Trade 
The World Wants More Pelts all the Time—Wilderness Supply Waning 
“Fur is Fur,” not only in sport, but in com¬ 
merce. Probably the most valuable and compre¬ 
hensive book ever issued on the subject of fur 
as a commercial proposition is the volume, “Fur 
Farming in Canada,” by J. Walter Jones, which 
has just been put forth in the form of a finely 
cloth bound book, of some 275 pages, lavishly 
illustrated, under the authority of the Commis¬ 
sion of Conservation of the Dominion of Can¬ 
ada. While the book might be interpreted from 
its title to deal only with the marketing of fur 
as an industry, it really covers a much wider 
field. Running through it there are to be found 
pages which reflect the romance of the trapper, 
and a great many lessons which, by illustration, 
show the necessity of careful conservation of our 
fur-bearing animals. 
It would not be proper to say that Canada is 
suffering from a craze of fur farming, but from 
an experiment of only a few years ago, it is 
rather startling to learn that the companies and 
partnerships, organized to breed fur-bearing ani¬ 
mals, mostly of the fox variety, represent a capi- 
alization of something between ten million and 
twelve million dollars. All this money has not 
been paid in cash, but nevertheless very large 
sums have been invested in the business. It is 
too early as yet to say that this business is pro¬ 
fitable as a whole; it has been extremely profit¬ 
able, and, in some cases, has proved a regula 
gold mine, in certain sections of Canada, partic¬ 
ularly in and around Prince Edward Island 
where the black fox seems to thrive best. There 
is some doubt also whether the enormous prices 
received for the beautiful fur of the black fox 
will be maintained in the future. Skins of Prince 
Edward Island raising have been sold in the Lon¬ 
don market for upward of $2,500 to $3,000, and 
as high as $35,000 has been paid for tested pairs 
of breeding animals. Those who visited Forest 
and Stream’s Sportsmen’s Show at the Grand 
Central Palace, New York City, last spring, will 
recall as having seen among the exhibits there, 
black and silver foxes, valued at $20,000. 
But, as argued in the volume under review, 
the demand for such magnificent furs will always 
exceed the supply, and even if prices drop, the in¬ 
dustry nevertheless will be very remunerative. 
The one feature that stands out prominently 
in every page of this authoritative volume is that 
the fur supply the world over is threatened. The 
ever expanding areas of human settlements have 
caused some kinds of fur-bearers to retreat far¬ 
ther into the woods. The clearing away of the 
forests and the grazing of the natural covers by 
domestic animals have destroyed their haunts 
and exposed them to their enemies. Draining 
swampy areas has destroyed the homes of the 
muskrat or musquash, the mink, the otter and the 
beaver. The fisher and the marten never seem 
to exist long near man’s habitation. Even the 
fox, which appears to increase near human set¬ 
tlements, will decrease if the forests are wholly 
removed or burned. 
We are glad that Mr. Jones has something to 
say with reference to unnecessary cruelty in trap¬ 
ping. After quoting from the monograph by 
Elliott Coues on the North American musteli- 
dae, aptly describing the actions of a mink when 
caught in a trap, he goes on to say: 
“When it is remembered that millions of ani¬ 
mals are captured yearly in traps, the sum total 
of their sufferings must be so great that the 
cruelty practiced on dumb domestic creatures, 
which so greatly concerns the Society for the 
Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, must seem 
light in comparison. The methods of killing do¬ 
mestic animals are humane and painless, and it 
would seem that humane considerations alone 
present a sufficient argument for the domestica- 
cation of funbearing animals. 
Forest and Stream’s well-known correspond¬ 
ent, Dr. Edward Breck, has also gone on record 
in these columns in the crusade against cruelty 
to trapped animals. 
In the short space at hand, it is entirely im¬ 
possible to more than hint at the contents of the 
book, but it covers the subject as no previous 
volume has attempted to do. Chapters on how 
to raise not only foxes, but mink and other wild 
animals are given, their habits are described, and 
a great deal of natural history is interspersed. 
There are chapters on “Reindeer Progress in 
Alaska,” and also on the efforts which have been 
made to domesticate the caribou in Labrador in 
Northwestern Canada. 
The reports of the sale of furs by the Hudson 
Bay Company, extending back many years, give 
one an idea of the enormous quantities of skins 
used 'by the civilized world for adornment or as 
protection against cold. How many people real¬ 
ize, for instance, that between eight and nine 
million skins of the common muskrat come on 
the market annually, and that within the last 
century and a half, records show that nearly a 
quarter of a billion of muskrats have been trap¬ 
ped. Even so, the supply has not greatly dimin¬ 
ished. Incidentally, it may be said that one of 
the most prosperous little industries that can be 
operated is a muskrat farm. All that is needed 
to begin such a farm is an available quantity of 
marsh land, and a reasonable degree of intelli¬ 
gence and industry. 
The value of the world’s production of furs 
is somewhere in the neighborhood of one hun¬ 
dred million dollars annually. Of this amount, 
the North American continent furnishes between 
a quarter and one-third the total. The prices of 
all furs are increasing despite efforts to domesti¬ 
cate the different varieties of fur-bearing ani¬ 
mals, and even substituting for trapped skins the 
coats of domestic animals, it is practically cer¬ 
tain that prices will continue to advance indefi¬ 
nitely. This means of itself that the incessant 
warfare against so many of the little animals 
with which all outdoor people are familiar will 
be kept up. Between the demands of the goddess 
of fashion and the retreating line of the wild, 
occasioned by the advancing forces of civiliza¬ 
tion, it looks as though the fur-bearer of th 
wilder and rarer variety is doomed, or at least 
from being an article of common use and neces¬ 
sity, fur will be more of a luxury even than now. 
But with the era of intelligence in fur-farming 
at hand, this period may be indefinitely postponed. 
