The meaning of the term vermin has not been very accurately defined. Johnson considers “any noxious animal” to belong to vermin; whilst Bailey, anxious to be more specific, defines vermin to be “any kind of hurtful creature or insect, as rats, mice, lice, fleas, bugs, &c.;” but whatever lexicographers may say upon the subject, there can be no doubt that, in country language, what are known as noxious animals are distinguished from noxious insects, the first being in most counties known as “Varment,” to which belong rats, mice, stoats, &c., to which the keeper would add kites, hawks, owls, magpies, and other birds; the second term being limited to those parasitic creatures by which both man and some inferior animals may be attacked.
The farmer’s notion of vermin, as applied to the hedge-row, differs from these, as it includes all beasts, birds, reptiles, insects, &c., which directly injure the hedge, together with such as choose the hedge-row or the bank on which it might be grown as a breeding-place, from which they migrate to farm crops, and so become injurious, not to the hedge alone, but to the farm in general.
Some notion of these may be inferred from the following list:—
| 1. | Rabbits—By burrowing in the hedge-bank. | |||||
| 2. | Hedge-hog—Ignorantly included with hedge-row vermin by the farmer. | |||||
| 3. | - | Stoats | - | These burrow or make the hedge-row or bank a place of refuge and concealment. | ||
| Rats | ||||||
| Mice | ||||||
| 4. | Snakes—Erroneously supposed to be injurious. | |||||
| 5. | - | Slugs | - | Both breed extensively in hedge-rows, which often form these hybernacula. | ||
| Snails | ||||||
| 6. | - | Insects injurious to the growing hedge-plants. | ||||
| Do. protected by the hedge, and migrating to the farm crops. | ||||||
| Do. harboured by hedge-row weeds, and thence migrating to the crops. | ||||||
| 7. | Birds in general, according to the dictum of the Sparrow Clubbists. | |||||
1. The rabbit is one of the greatest pests to the bank on which hedges are too often grown, and therefore is injurious to the growing hedge, to say nothing of the mischief which these creatures do to the crops. The other day we visited a field in which a hedge-bank had been undermined with no less than fifty holes in the distance of five-and-twenty yards; these ramified in every direction, not only through the raised mound, but into the fields on either side of the hedge, and out of which rabbits were dug from a depth of as much as four feet. Here the ridiculous nature of the mound was the primary cause of the mischief, and hence we here offer an illustration of the general facts which met our view:—
Diagram of a Mound and Ditch in Oolite Sands.
| ft. | in. | |
| a. A rabbit hole. | ||
| 1. and 5. Grass and weeds which cannot be ploughed | 5 | 0 |
| 2. Mound for fence | 8 | 0 |
| 3. Bottom of ditch | 3 | 0 |
| 4. Field side of ditch | 6 | 0 |
| 6. Arable field | — | |
| Total | 22 | 0 |
Here it will be seen that not only has nearly twenty feet of land been taken up with the fence, but the plan upon which it is made of itself suggests a rabbit-warren, and especially when we say that the soil is of a loose sandy nature, and the ditch has never yet been a conduit for running water, and is therefore perfectly unnecessary.
2. The hedge-hog is here only mentioned in the hope of dispelling a popular prejudice with regard to him. He is ruthlessly destroyed as vermin, on the supposition that the hedge screens a traitor who is ever ready to suck eggs or to take a meal from the cow’s udder. Now, as regards the first charge, one would have thought that, from the pertinacity displayed by those who bring it in destroying birds’ eggs and birds of every kind, they would have little care upon this head. His sucking of cows has never been witnessed by any competent observer, and with such the idea was never entertained, nor can it be supposed that a cow would suffer the approach of a creature so thoroughly armed with spines as the hedge-hog. In the words of Yarrell we may conclude that “this is about as well-founded an accusation as that of Pliny, exaggerated as it is by Sperling, who assures us that it ascends trees, knocks off the apples and pears, and, throwing itself down upon them that they may stick to its spines, trots off with the prize! Ælian gives us the same story, substituting figs for apples, and omitting the climbing power of the animal.”