The fall guys of the animal kingdom

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.