In other words....Ferret...err..mink problem persists
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/ar ... Oct17.html
The Fur Flies and Crawls and Bites
Minks Released by Activists Raise a Stink Near Seattle
By Blaine Harden
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, October 18, 2003; Page A01
SULTAN, Wash. -- He has killed 20 of them with a shotgun. Still, flesh-eating fugitives are skulking around Jeffrey Weaver's place here in the deep green foothills of the Cascade Mountains.
The escapees stink to high heaven, but that is the least of Weaver's complaints. They have slaughtered dozens of his ducks and chickens, feasted on fingerling salmon in his creek and had the temerity to bite his dog in the throat. One of them leapt out of the shadows and scratched his arm. "For the size of the animal, I have never seen such a killer," said Weaver, 48, a laid-off Boeing worker who now works as a fishing guide. "They are brutal little guys."
The fugitives are farm-raised minks, running amok in the northern exurbs of Seattle, trying to figure out how to survive in an uncaged world. They are holdouts from a herd of 10,000 minks that on Aug. 25 was released from cages at the Roesler Brothers Fur Farm here in Sultan, a town of 4,100 people.
The Animal Liberation Front, which the FBI has said is responsible for more than 600 animal-related crimes in the past seven years, has claimed responsibility for the mink break. Fur farms in Washington state have been targeted seven times by animal rights groups since 1995. But the release at Roesler Brothers, the state's largest fur farm, dwarfs all previous attacks in Washington, as measured by the number of fur-bearing creatures set free. No arrests have been made in any of the incidents.
Fur Commission USA, a group representing mink farmers in 28 states, says the strike here by "eco-terrorists" caused the second-largest release of minks in U.S. history. An Iowa mink farm, where more than 14,000 minks were set loose in 2000, holds the record. The Animal Liberation Front also claimed responsibility for the Iowa release, calling it a "beautiful act of compassion."
So far, the lives of most of the minks released from the Roesler farm have been far from beautiful.
In the first few hours after the minks got loose, cars squashed a couple hundred of them. Kate Roesler, whose husband has helped run the fur farm here for 25 years, explained why so many minks ran into oncoming traffic.
"We feed them from motorized carts," she said. "They have been conditioned to associate the sound of a motor with food."
The minks, which are about the size of small squirrels, ran loose after unidentified intruders opened cages at 3 a.m. Aug. 25 and knocked down a section of fence surrounding the fur farm. With the help of scores of townspeople, many of whom ran over minks in their rush to be neighborly, the Roesler family managed to round up all but about 1,500 of the minks within 48 hours.
In a small-town setting, minks -- especially farm-raised ones -- are surprisingly easy to find. They caw like large crows, and they smell really bad, owing to a foul substance they secrete from under their tail to mark turf. When town residents heard or sniffed trouble in a garage or underneath a house, they called the Roeslers, who quickly caught stragglers with fishing nets, snares and traps.
The roundup, though, triggered a grisly secondary crisis -- cannibalism.
Minks have been raised on farms in the United States and Europe for more than a century -- and farmed minks make up about 80 percent of the fur content in mink coats and stoles. But unlike cows or pigs, minks are not even close to being domesticated. The short-legged, needle-toothed members of the weasel family remain wild predators in their cages. They will bite just about anyone who tries to touch them.
Farmed mink get along reasonably well with one another, but only if they grow up as littermates in the same cage. When minks from different cages are tossed in together - - as happened with the animals released and captured here -- they often have an insatiable desire to kill and eat one another.
"There is no way to stop it, because you can't tell who is related to who," Roesler said. "Ten to 20 a day are still eating each other."
About 1,000 or so minks remain unaccounted for -- and it is the fate of those missing minks that foments an especially heated animal rights debate.
The Animal Liberation Front, in its claim of responsibility that was e-mailed to local news media, declared that farm-raised mink, once free, can "survive and flourish in the wild." The group's Internet missives insist that it is a self-serving canard to suggest otherwise.
The Fur Commission disagrees, arguing that farmed minks, accustomed to regular feedings and a steady supply of water, will starve or die of thirst outside the fur-farm environment.
The average farmed mink, by the way, lives about nine months, at which time it is "pelted" and its flesh is rendered to make mink oil for boots. In the wild, a mink's normal lifespan is two to five years.
What, then, is happening to the several hundred farmed minks that have escaped the current fall pelting season and may still be prowling around Sultan?
Jeffery Weaver, who owns a pair of night-vision goggles, has observed them adapting, with apparent aplomb, to life on the wild side.
He said he has sat up all night on his wooded, creek-braided three-acre property and, wearing his night-vision gear, watched minks nibble on ripe blackberries, catch small salmon and kill his ducks.
"A few weeks ago, when they first got out, they were freaked," Weaver said. "Now, some of them are starting to do quite well."
Ruth Milner, district biologist for the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife, agrees that some of the minks will probably be able to carve out a niche for themselves in the foothills of the Cascades. The area is laced with rivers and rich in fish, rodents and other small mammals upon which minks prey.
"There is a pretty brutal learning curve for predators in the wild," Milner said. "But if they survive the first few months or get through the first winter, they'll probably make it."
There are wild minks on the western slopes of the Cascades, and Milner expects that any farm-raised escapees that make it through the winter will breed with them.
In recent years in England, when animal activists released thousands of farmed minks, the freed creatures decimated local populations of the beloved water vole.
There are no water voles in western Washington or any other creatures that are likely to be pushed to extinction by, at most, a few hundred farm-raised minks gone native, Milner said, but in select areas such as Weaver's property, it is probably very risky to be a fish, a nesting bird or a mouse.
"These minks," she said, "are perfectly capable of wiping them out."
© 2003 The Washington Post Company
