SOME years ago there was a story in my local paper about a goat farm where most of the goats had been savagely attacked and killed during the night.
Mink were blamed for the damage. I heard a similar story on the radio a couple of weeks ago where a woman from the west of Ireland claimed that a pack of mink had killed a number of her lambs and had started to turn their attention to full grown sheep.
This is frankly impossible, for a number of reasons. First of all mink are very small animals. Adult males weigh about a kilogram and adult females about half that. This means they are smaller than the average domestic cat and considerably less dangerous because they lack a cat’s secret weapon of sharp retracting claws.
They are also extremely territorial and neither the males nor the females will tolerate another animal of the same sex in their territory. This means that a pack of mink is an impossibility. Young mink, which are called ‘kits’, do stay with their mother until they’re fully grown but as the maximum recorded litter size is five the maximum possible number of mink you could see together is a family of six.
A mink can not kill a sheep or a goat, or even a lamb or a kid. Not even a cat can. But the mink is an unpopular animal and gets blamed for damage done by other carnivores.
I listened carefully to the woman on the radio. The lambs that were killed were nearly the size of adult sheep, which they would be in late summer. She discovered them in the morning and she deduced that mink were the culprits because the eyes had been eaten and there were puncture marks around the head and neck which she believed were caused by the mink drinking blood.
These gruesome details are exactly what happens when grey crows or ravens feed on a carcass. Even a bird the size of a raven is not able to tear up a sheep but can only stab at it and eat soft tissue. This has actually been proved experimentally in Germany.
Of course the sheep weren’t killed by birds. I don’t know what did kill them but the most likely culprit is a pack of domestic dogs. But mink got blamed because they’re unpopular animals and dogs are not.
Rats are also unpopular animals and are also unfairly blamed for crimes they seldom, if ever, commit. Most people associate them with disease. This may be based on the horrors of the Black Death.
Rats were implicated in the Black Death but it was the black rat that was responsible. This species is now probably extinct in Ireland. The brown rat, which is still very much with us, hadn’t even arrived in Europe in the 14th century.
Other people will mention Weil’s disease, also known as leptospirosis. It’s true that the bacterium that causes this unpleasant and occasionally fatal disease is carried by some rats and can be transmitted through their urine. But it’s carried by a lot of other animals as well, including mice and voles and even deer, sheep, dogs and cattle.
Swans are not unpopular birds but they sometimes appear aggressive, particularly if they have cygnets. So the myth has arisen that they can break your arm with a blow from a wing –- another impossibility. Their wing bones are extremely fragile. We seem to be good at inventing prejudices about other species.
* dick.warner@examiner.ie
a d v e r t i s e m e n t
This appeared in the printed version of the Irish Examiner Monday, August 24, 2009
