Scent to try us

Lithe, opportunistic and with a predilection for poultry, these elusive, often pocketsized predators have long raised a stink for farmers and gamekeepers, but not all of them deserve such an otterly bad rap, believes John Lewis-Stempel

- John Lewis-Stempel

AMUSTELID by another name would whiff as bad. The mammalian Mustelidae family comes in all sorts of shapes, from bulky badger to slinky stoat, but all are carnivorous, with well-developed scent glands under the tail. Or, in plain Anglo-Saxon, their bottoms doth make pongs like stink-bombs.

Brock the badger's shambling corporeality notwithstanding, Britain's mustelids are generally long-bodied beings, with short legs and a highly flexible spinal column. Think Tarka the Otter. Or a furry, bendy tube with four flurrying stumps. Apart from Brock and Tarka, our native mustelids are the pine marten, the stoat, the weasel, and the polecat. To this pack of six must be added the American mink, now running wild across much of the isles following its escape from fur farms in the 1930s. As pipe-shaped mustelid morphology has low thermal value, the smaller mustelids are compensated by a dense, sometimes luxurious fur coating. As are said mink, the pelts of which once upon a Hollywood time adorned every screen goddess.

The mini mustelids also possess very active metabolism-a weasel burns as much as 30% of its body weight per day. Their seeking of breakfast, elevenses, lunch, tea, and midnight snack is near hyper-active. Mustelids are also beady-eyed inquisitive. Hence 'ferret about', the ferret being a domesticated polecat.

The Mustelidae arose about 16.1 million years ago, so must be counted among Britain's oldest landowners. Paleontological evidence shows that badgers have been snouting about the place for at least 250,000 years. Human interaction with our mustelid landlords has been troubled and ambivalent. We have baited badger and hunted otter. In Tudor times, we employed the weasel as a household mouser, but, more recently, the beast is ingrained in the popular psyche as sly and untrustworthy. "To weasel out' of a situation is synonymous with clever, albeit dishonest avoidance.