In the countryside, the weasel is a very common animal, and the frequent stealing of chickens also makes the weasel cause a lot of trouble to farmer friends. In some areas, the weasel is also given a mythological color, and the people call it "Wong Tai Sin", ranking one of the five immortals in the family. In fact, its unassuming weasel is actually full of treasures, whether it is skin, flesh and bones have a high use value, but why has no one breed weasels on a large scale?
The weasel is a small carnivore of the mustela family, also known as the weasels. The animal is small, with adult weasels no more than 40 centimeters long and weighing less than three pounds. In rural areas, it is often notorious for stealing chickens, and the means of escape when encountering threats is very special, that is, farting. When the weasel is running away, it will shoot a foul-smelling secretion through a pair of stinky glands near the anus, making the hit predators vomit and even unconscious, which also led to some more superstitious views of the weasel in the early days.
In fact, the weasel is an animal with extremely high breeding potential and has good commercial value and medicinal value.
The weasel's fur has the title of "soft gold", the texture is very smooth, the feel is excellent, and it is a very high-grade fur raw material. As early as the Middle Ages, European aristocrats had used the fur of the weasel to make a fur coat, and each of these coats made of the fur of the weasel was worth a lot. What many people may not know is that the more high-grade wolf brush in the brush does not use real wolf hair, but a handful of tougher hairs on the tail of the weasel.
In addition to the precious fur, weasel meat is also of great medicinal value. Although few people will actively eat weasel meat, the ancient Chinese people have discovered and recorded the medicinal value of weasel meat hundreds of years ago. For example, in the "Treasure Book of Eastern Medicine", there is a record of "weasel meat as the end, and cure the sore fistula for a long time". Wild weasels are now so rare due to over-capture and habitat destruction that it is difficult to see them in rural areas, and in 2000 the weasel was added to the list of protected animals.
Since weasels are not of great value and are not allowed to hunt wild weasels, why is no one breeding them on a large scale?
In fact, it is not that farmers are reluctant to raise weasels, but that the goods are too difficult to serve.
The first is that it is difficult to domesticate, the weasel is full of wild nature day and night, coupled with its cunning and multi-ended personality, making domesticating the weasel the number one problem in artificial breeding. The weasel, which is not easy to domesticate, is also very likely to take advantage of the night to bite open the cage and sneak away, leaving the farmer in vain.
Judging from the habits of the weasel, the weasel is a natural hunter in the wild, not only preying on small animals including mice, frogs, pigeons, etc., but sometimes even hunting rabbits and other animals that are much larger than themselves. In the wild weasels also have the habit of storing food, so the artificial breeding process can only be fed with meat, which makes the breeding of weasels have a considerable cost.
The economic benefits of the weasel under the high cost of investment are not outstanding. Because the replaceability of weasel skins is very high, whether it is coats or brushes made of weasel skins, they can be replaced by fox and ferret furs. The medicinal value of weasel meat can also be replaced by other medicinal materials, so we can only see a small number of Chinese medicine stores sell weasels meat as medicinal materials, and the use of it is very limited and the market demand is very small.
Compared with foxes, ferrets and other animals that also eat meat, the advantages of weasels are not prominent.
The first is the low yield of small furs. Also high-grade fur, an adult fox produces several times more fur than an adult weasel, and raising a fox earns more than a weasel in a year. And weasel fur also has a characteristic, that is, the quality is very obviously affected by the season. The quality of fur in winter is significantly higher than in other seasons, so the only suitable for weasel farming is the relatively long winter in the northeast.
Second, weasels have a low reproductive capacity. Only one litter can be bred a year, and the number of cubs per litter is only 8 at most, which is basically a low reproductive ability among artificially bred animals, and it is difficult to ensure the scale of breeding. Even if large-scale farming is achieved, weasels will be a new problem. Since scientists have very little research on weasel disease, once a large-scale infectious disease breaks out during the breeding process, farmers will almost inevitably suffer huge losses.
As we said earlier, weasels release foul-smelling secretions through stinky glands near their anus when they encounter predators. In large-scale farms, hundreds of weasels emit secretions from stinky glands, which will fill the entire farm with a foul odor, and the folk have the saying that "it is better to raise stinky days than to raise Huang Daxian", which is enough to see how unpopular the breeding of weasels is.
On the whole, breeding weasels presents a high-cost, high-risk, low-income situation, so it is not surprising that no one raises weasels.
The same is the ferret family of animals, in foreign stoats, weasels and other looks very petite and cute ferrets have been approved as pet breeding, in the network has gained a lot of likes, but at present no one in China is willing to raise weasels as pets, the state has not approved, so at present, the value of weasels is not a very good means of use.
In fact, there is currently no need to exploit the value of weasels through artificial breeding, because weasels living in the wild already have great value to humans. At this time, some people will say that the weasel that steals chickens is already good without letting people suffer losses, and expects it to be beneficial to humans?
In fact, the weasel stealing the chicken is largely a misunderstanding, because the chicken is not the main hunting object of the weasel, and the mouse is the main dish on the weasel's table. As a small expert mouse catcher, the weasel can destroy more than 2,000 rats a year, which plays a good role in protecting crops. Only in the middle of winter or when food is scarce will weasels desperately prey on farmers' poultry. The probability of a weasel encountering a man is also very low, and even if it does, it will flee immediately.
Today, wild weasels are becoming less numerous under the influence of human activities, but there are still many people who have deep prejudices about weasels. We need to find ways to live in harmony between humans and weasels, both to avoid the loss of weasels to farmers, but also to keep the number of weasels at a certain level, and to take advantage of the advantages of weasels in agriculture.
What do you think of this mythical animal?