STOATS AND WEASELS.

Press, Volume LX, Issue 18229, 13 November 1924, Page 5

STOATS AND WEASELS.

AN OLD INTERVIEW. A correspondent sends us a cutting from the "Weekly Press" of May 20th, 1887, recording an interview with Mr H. Allbones, who had arrived from England with one of several cargoes of stoats and weasels which had been coming m since 1882. "You will get nothing better tor raobits than stoats and weasels. Every time they want a feed they kill $ fresh rabbit, and when they're hunting, it they light upon a nest of ten young ones, they kill them all. They eat nothing dead, not even a pigeon that dies itself, though they are very fond of pigeons. But they'll never, come near buildings, and there's nothing to be feared from them, either for children or poultry. It's never been known of them to come near buildings; they're too wild, and you couldn't hunt them in, and they haven't any taste for^ poultry. I pulled a white stoat that's a winter stoat —out of a stack on a farm in Lincolnshire, and the poultry used to be -always feeding round that stack, but the stoat had been coming and going for a long while, and the farmer had never lost a single fowl." To an enquiry about the possibility of the vermin multiplying and being forced ■ overcrowding to look for sustenance down country, Mr Allbones replied:— "There won't be any overcrowding with them. If there were, they're very soon trapped off, if you want to trap them off. But they don't increase very fast. For one thing their life's but three years, for they wear out their pin teeth cracking the/rabbit's skull. They strike just behind the ear, so as to cut the jugular vein, and their teeth strike the bone and wear away quickly, for they Ire a regular needle point. And then the young ones are six weeks before they can see. No, they'll never get too plentiful. I know a place in Leicestershire where they've never killed one since th?y began. They keep a lot to kill the rats and rabbits, but the' stoats never kill poultry; an'd when they can't get rabbits they kill one another —aye, and eat one another, too. I've seen one stoat kill another and eat him all, and when you went to pick him up there was nothing but the skin opened from end to end and' stretched out flat. Keep them in boxes, and I've known then} eat one another, all but the tail. "Now, the ferret's different. It was a ferret that bit that child I hear talk about down South. A ferret's good for nothing, won't stop out, always comes back to the buildings, and when it's prowling about it 'll eat any mortal thing. It wants handling every day to keep it

the rabbits down. Mr Swailes, of Rawby, in Lincolnshire, had a • stoat among his rabbits last year, and he had hardly a rabbit to shoot." "That was among burrows, Mr Allbones; will they be as successful with the rabbits here, that nest in a tussock on the hillside?" "That, they will; they're always travelling, are stoats, and they 'll catch a hare. The hare can never get away from them, though she runs through hedges, and they bite down through the top of the head till they kill her; and they never take more than just the blood." * . ' "Hard weather kill them m the ranges? Not m,uch. We get snow at Home that lies for weeks, and melts and freezes till it's -all ice. But you don t find stoats and weasels the scarcer for it." " Our reporter asked about the number imported. "My son'has brought over five shipments,' 'said Mr Allbones, "making 1160 stoats and weasels, and. there was another shipment for Mr Ritchey, of Bushy Park, I think,.of which most were drowned. For a shipment of 300 you want 4000 pigeons to be used 6n the voyage, and that will give you an idea of the'way they would destroy the rabbits where they were thick. I had to go to Antwerp for the pigeons—rcouldn t have got them in England for anything like a reasonable price—and I bought them there for 8d apiece easily enough. But they'd have thought I was crazed if I'd asked for that number at Home. They would come to about lOd apiece with the shipping charges." "I paid 4s 6d apiece for weasels, and 8d carriage, reckoning an average, as 1 paid the carriage whether they came from far or near. I advertised in the '' Daily Telegraph'' and the '' Yorkshire Post " so as to get it known everywhere, and someone put it in th» "Field," but I don't know who. At first people thought it was a hoax, but bv-and-by they began to send them to me. The lumber I had of the cases they came in was something to look at. People wouldn't handle them, and they'd shpve them into an old box, or watering pot, or kerosene tin, or anything handy, and send them in just bundled out of the trap they were caught in. [The trap was a box trap placed in the hedge, for they always run about the hedge, and there's a spring which takes them as they run, and lands them safely in the box.] "Well, the consequence was that many of them were maimed or damaged. I used to look at every one —catch him behind the head and hold his hind feet, and sometimes he'd have lost an eye or a leg, and sometimes his teeth would be nearly done. I paid 6s apiece for stoats, so they had to be in good condition for me to accept them. "I built a great shed to put them in, fitted all round with shelves. Boxes had to be lined with zinc, for they'd soon gnaw a hole big enough for them to get out of, and the Company would | not ship them without. The first lot of boxes cost 16s; afterwards I bought the j material and got it made up, and they came down to lis 6d. They have to be made with fixings so that they can be kept clean. "There are not many men in the business, and it isn't . everybody, could manage it. You see, it. takes a.bitvqf! scholarship to buy all that material "and; make all the arrangements." And Mr Allbones shows our reporter with prido a letter signed by Mr "Walter Kennaway, Secretary of the Agent-General's office, testifying to the faithfulness and ability ! with which his work has been done. "I have been all my life at this sort of work," he continues. "I am a vermin destroyer for a numb'er of large estates, , including Lord Yarborough's estate, Brocklesby" Park. At' present there • are no shipments coming out, but I had an enquiry. whether .' I, could. - get more, > and I said I could." • '