Orcasional Musings | What about minks?

||| ORCASIONAL MUSINGS BY STEVE HENIGSON |||

Several weeks ago, the subject of this column was otters, an odiferous but friendly and entertaining animal. This week, we go in the opposite direction and look at the mink, one of the nastiest, most pernicious, equally bad smelling, and all-around unpleasant of Mother Nature’s many interesting creatures.

Although we don’t see them very often, minks have been here on Orcas longer than people have. Minks make their living by wantonly killing other animals, almost, it often seems, for sport rather than for food. They are particularly fond of chickens and ducks, not least because we put our domestic fowl in pens, providing the interested mink with a captive audience which has no ability to escape being victimized.

When a female mink delivers a litter of pups and begins breast-feeding them, she becomes voraciously hungry. She will go out on killing sprees, and will murder many more animals than she would ever need to eat. She will even lay her uneaten victims out in neatly arranged assortments, after drinking a little blood from each one. Minks will kill any animal that they can, and they are a definite danger to mice, voles, land and sea birds, and even fish. They are strong swimmers, even if water isn’t their favorite medium.

Minks usually avoid people, but once in a while there’s a chance for interaction with one. Heed the warning: Don’t do it! Minks are cute, but they are also vicious. Several years ago, a long-time Orcas resident wrote a letter to the local newspaper about having cornered a “cute little mink” when she was a child, and about the fortunate intervention of an alert adult neighbor. The neighbor pointed out that minks are naturally programmed to go for the eyes of an adversary with their sharp claws and teeth, and that there was no cure for mink-induced blindness.

Like otters, minks mark their homes and their territory with fecal material (“scat”). They use their scat as a means of communication, and also as a warning: “Keep Out!” The scat is dark, long, and thin, and may contain the undigested bits and pieces of the mink’s most recent killing expedition. If you see mink scat, it means that a lair is nearby, and it tells you to give it a wide berth: “Do Not Feed or Annoy the Mink.”

Speaking for myself, I do not understand why the People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) object to the making, selling, and wearing of mink coats and other accessories. Considering the amount of wanton and unnecessary damage that minks do to other animals, I should think that, ethically speaking, promoting the death of as many minks as possible would be a worthy goal.