Abstract
SINCE the musk-rat campaign was commenced by the Department of Agriculture for Scotland, in October 1927, the official trappers have killed 945 individuals. To this must be added 60 killed by private persons, a total of 1,085, the progeny of five females and four males which escaped from an enclosure in Perthshire in 1927. Even the artificial pond on Gleneagles Golf Course has yielded five since the beginning of November 1934 (Scottish Naturalist, 1934, p. 11). As a rule, the traps were laid at the mouth of a burrow, and a remarkable fact is that they did much more damage to other wild creatures than to the musk-rats themselves. Mr. T. Munro, who supervised the work, records the death in traps set for musk-rats of 1,745 brown rats, 2,305 water-voles, 57 weasels, 36 stoats, 2,178 moorhens, 101 ducks, and a miscellaneous collection of birds, including amongst others 23 seagulls, 13 redshanks, 28 snipe, 15 blackbirds and a solitary kingfisher-a list of misadventures which runs to 6,587 items. It is possible that this very considerable slaughter cannot be avoided, but apart from the brown rats the majority of the wild creatures slain are harmless, if not even useful from the human point of view, so that every effort should be made to confine the work of the traps to the pests they are meant to capture.
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Musk-Rats in Scotland. Nature 135, 336 (1935). https://doi.org/10.1038/135336c0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/135336c0