“If we consider the animal creation on a broad scale, the aggregate of living beings will be found to be the devourers and destroyers of others.” The editor of Cassel’s Natural History is responsible for this statement, and it struck me as a forcible and appropriate one for this chapter on weasels, etc. Without doubt the weasel, next to the rat, is one of the most destructive of our vermin, preying as it does with extraordinary ferocity on leverets, chicken, young ducks, pigeons, rabbits, in fact, on all creatures more timorous than itself. Truly it is not a very formidable enemy to the farmer in connection with his granaries and other stores, for it is an inveterate slayer of ruts and mice, but the gamekeeper cannot tolerate it. Its “treasons, stratagems and spoils” are, without exception, excessive above all other of the spoiling mammalia whatsoever.
Perhaps you doubt the conclusions to which I arrive in reference to this pretty, brown-backed white-bodied little animal, and there are some naturalists whose writings seem to clothe it with very different characteristics. A certain Mademoiselle de Laistre seems to contradict, in one of her letters, the commonly received opinion that it cannot be domesticated. She describes with touching minuteness how her weasel would drink milk out of her hands and fondle with her, showing signs of satisfaction and enjoyment, which could scarcely be apart from intelligence. “The little creature,” she says, “can distinguish my voice amid twenty others, and springs over every one in the room till it finds me. Nothing can exceed the lively and pleasing way it caresses me with its two little paws; it frequently pats me on the chin in a manner that expresses the utmost fondness. This, with a thousand other kindnesses, convinces me of the sincerity of its attachment. He is quite aware of my intention when dressed to go out, and then it is with much difficulty I can rid myself of him. On these occasions he will conceal himself behind a cabinet near the door and spring on me as I pass with astonishing quickness.”
This testimony would seem to rather invest [mustela] vulgaris with domestic virtues at least rare in his family, and, sooth to say, there is a vast crowd of witnesses waiting to be heard, whose report of his character is far different. The weasel, agile and lithe as he is, is ferocious to the degree which scorns fear, and there are many instances wherein he has attacked the absolute viceroy of creation—man.
I recollect once chasing a weasel with some determination and finding myself suddenly confronted by some seven or eight others, who ran up my legs and endeavored to reach my face. Fortunately I beat them off and killed seven with the stick I carried, but I feel satisfied I should not have escaped so well if I had not stood my ground and luckily possessed a stick.
I have frequently heard of similar experiences, and one I find is recorded in a cutting from a Scotch newspaper in my scrap-book.
One night, it appears, the father of Captain Brown, the naturalist, was returning from Gilmerton, near Edinburgh, by the Dalkeith road. He observed on the high ground at a considerable distance betwixt him and Craigmillar Castle a man who was leaping about performing a number of antic gestures more like those of a madman than of a sane person. After contemplating this apparently absurd conduct, he thought it might be some unfortunate maniac, and, climbing over the walls, made directly towards him. When he got pretty near he saw that the man had been attacked, and was defending himself against the assaults of a number of small animals which he at first took for rats, but which, in fact, turned out on getting closer, to be a colony of from fifteen to twenty weasels, which the unfortunate man was tearing from him and endeavoring to keep from his throat. Had he not been a powerful man, capable of sustaining the extreme fatigue of this singular exertion, he probably would have succumbed to the repeated efforts made by the ferocious little creatures to get at his throat. As it was, his hands were much bitten, and bleeding profusely.
It further appears that the commencement of the battle was nearly as follows. He was walking slowly through the park when he happened to see a weasel. He ran at it, and made several unsuccessful attempts to strike it with a small cane he held in his hand. On coming near the rock, he got between it and the animal, and thus cut off retreat. The weasel squeaked out aloud, when a sortie of the whole colony was made, and the affray commenced.
Apropos of this, I have read somewhere of a colony of rats attacking a condemned criminal in the sewers of Paris—or in a dungeon closely contiguous—and I can quite believe that hunger and numbers would render these horrible vermin capable of homicide.
I do not quite see how any one can pity the members of this weasel family. Let any one of my boy readers hear the agonized cries of a pursued rabbit as it finds its relentless foe chasing it with a determination and persistence quite unequaled, and he will probably find the American love of fair play prompt him to take the weaker creature’s part.
Emphatically I declare it—a weasel never relinquishes its quarry till the life’s blood has been sucked and the brain extracted and eaten. Then wasteful as the little tyrant is, the rats may have the remainder, whilst it seeks for more prey. Its little finger-thick body and black, venom-leaden eyes seem the incarnation of destructiveness, whilst over the sharp incisive teeth rows might well be written