Chapter 20 eighteen fur animals

in the name of vanity ★Fur Mammals are hairy animals by definition, although there are still some animals that have almost no hair when they mature, such as whales, manatees, elephants, and hippos.Early humans kept the furs of their prey for food; whether it was leather or fur, animal skins were arguably the earliest cloth for humans.When the climate is colder, animal skins may be the main purpose of human hunting.As glaciers spread across the European continent, covering the body to keep warm was the most basic need for survival, and of course protein was also a must.When human beings sleep curled up in a cold cave, and outside the cave is snow and hail, they must be eager to sleep on animal skins, or to cover their naked bodies with it.

Humans have developed other fabrics a long time ago.We don't know exactly when humans started kneading and weaving goat hair and using it to replace hides, but it's reasonable to infer that when goats and humans first became associated.In some cultures, hammered bark (rough and not warm) was used for cloth, and later natural fibers like cotton and wool were also used.The manufacture of cloth began before the age of agriculture and has continued into modern times.Today, man-made fibers are also used as raw materials for fabrics. Since ancient times, even though countless weaving techniques have been developed, humans still have the habit of wearing fur, especially women.What was once a basic living habit of the more advanced cavemen has become, in recent centuries, the ultimate expression of wealth, sophistication and style.In some cultures, silver ermine and sea otter pelts are reserved specifically for the exclusive use of royalty.However, more and more people now regard this habit as a kind of cruel and heartless behavior, and wearing fur is gradually declining in many modern societies.Not only has wearing fur become an outdated idea, it is now viewed by many as an outrageous act of cruelty.

Exactly when and where humans began pen-breeding fur-providing animals for fur, and why these experiments mostly failed, we do not know; as for how many species humans have tried and abandoned, it is still unknown.However, we can still try to reconstruct some parts of the plot. ★fox In Switzerland, people have been feeding foxes in enclosures as early as the Neolithic age.In some sites, there are more fox bones than dog bones, and there is various evidence that the remains of foxes, a small canine, were eaten by humans.These foxes may be red foxes, an Old World animal dating back to the Pleistocene period, in other words, red foxes existed when humans were still evolving.A large number of fox bones have also been found in Zhelico, which also shows that the local people also used them as food animals.

Therefore, we can speculate that humans kept fox fur after eating fox meat, and then the habit of eating fox meat began to be replaced by other kinds of meat protein.It is impossible to know whether humans continued to raise foxes for fur or stopped raising foxes for thousands of years. In short, we have reason to believe that the first captive fox in Switzerland represents at least the first step in raising foxes for human beings.Bone abnormalities, as well as diseases such as arthritis, can make survival in the wild extremely difficult or even impossible.Apparently the foxes were bred by humans, and their skeletons are smaller than the local wild foxes, so they may have actually been fully bred by humans.

There are obvious reasons why humans keep foxes and other fur animals instead of trapping or killing them.Animals grow fur primarily for protection, and in response to this need, fur is most abundant in winter, while some fur animals get their coats matted during the hotter months of spring and summer.However, setting traps in the winter is strenuous and even dangerous work, so raising the animals in pens and then slaughtering them in the safety and comfort of a farm during the winter when their coats are at their best Much easier. There are currently millions of foxes raised by humans in captivity.The silvery variant of the red fox was bred in the coastal provinces of Canada towards the end of the last century.Other varieties are now bred in addition, so foxes raised on farms should be considered domesticated animals.Humans select foxes for their coat color and quality and breed them based on monetary considerations.In the wild, silver or blue variants are rare.

Between 1930 and 1940, bulky fox fur coats became so popular that movie stars even wore fox fur coats over their swimsuits when they were photographed.Single or double strips of fox fur and faux fox heads with glass eyes were worn as scarves around the shoulders and became standard accessories of clothing.Fortunately, these days such clothing has been considered obsolete art. ★Weasels and other animals Mink is a member of the mink family and a cousin of the badger, skunk, weasel and otter.Since the 1880s, people have not only caught minks, but also kept them in pens.Mink fur has been a sought-after item for centuries.By this century, the mink had become a status symbol.Not so long ago, owning a mink coat meant success.Mink, like foxes, have been bred by humans for millions of heads, and some mutants have been bred from them, and then carefully selected from them to meet the popular and valuable coat colors.Therefore, the mink should be considered as a domestic animal.We don't know much about the early history of the mink.Except for those who suffer from hunger, perhaps humans have never considered it as an important food source.

The most valuable fur animal was the sable, and the Russians made a lot of money from them.In the 1700s, the fur market in Siberia alone probably had hundreds of thousands of sable fur transactions every year.Now, most of the sources of sables come from professional shooters, and some come from farms that specialize in raising sables.The status of sables among domestic animals has not been assessed, although they may not even count as livestock. North American musk vole is also an animal that humans raise commercially for fur, but it is not as numerous as foxes and minks.Despite its slightly lower pelt value, it is still caught in the millions.However, it is not considered a domestic animal.

An important South American rodent called the coypu (the fur trade calls it the coypu) has been introduced to the United States since at least the 1930s and is bred in Louisiana.It's doubtful, though, whether it ever came close to captive status. Other fur animals that are often used in the declining fur industry may have been bred in pens, but they are not technically farmed animals.These animals include: beaver, otter, sea otter, mink, fisher, wolf, coyote, arctic fox, hare, leopard, jaguar, cheetah, snow leopard, clouded leopard, tiger, ocelot, leopard cat, lynx, bobcat , servals, several species of jungle cats, civets, marten, and several species of bears, wolverines, and some seals and sea lions, all squirrels, skunks, silver martens, various monkeys, especially colobus monkeys, and others All kinds of animals.Since prehistoric times, humans have been slaughtering animals, especially carnivores.

Many animals used for the fur trade are now scarce, threatened with extinction or are endangered.Furthermore, the problem will only increase as habitats shrink.The natural trend should be to keep increasing the number of animals on farms for slaughter, but it is more likely that the fur industry may cease before any animals can be raised by humans like foxes or minks.Fox farming and mink farming, which were once very common in the United States and Canada, have now almost all been transferred to South Korea, so South Korea has become the source of most fur.Even the fur farming trade journals that were published in the US and Canada no longer exist.

The difference between using fur to arouse moral outrage in humans that using leather does not elicit such a strong response is that most people judge by the original intention of use.Most of the world's leather currently comes from food animals, and most people in the world are meat eaters, so people are less averse to the use of leather.Leather from crocodile, ostrich, lizard, and snake skins were incidental luxuries, while cow and pig hides, as well as buffalo and horse hides, were the main sources of leather.Our vital domestic animals provide an amount of tannable leather unmatched by any other wild animal.

★Cheetah Except for the occasional fur animal (its fur is of poor quality), humans have bred cheetahs in captivity since at least dynastic times in Egypt.The cheetah is the most docile of all wild cats, and it can quickly adapt to life around humans. There are almost no incidents of tame cheetahs attacking humans.In fact, even wild cheetahs rarely attack humans.Surprisingly, cheetahs are the fastest of all four-legged animals, but they are not at all difficult to catch.It quiets down quickly and is easy to tame and keep. In medieval times, cheetahs were highly regarded and, like falcons, were often used to chase and hunt prey.This sport is clearly reserved for the rich.Although called a cheetah, its claws cannot be fully retracted; it is not closely related to leopards or other cats.In the 1950s, according to records, the emperor Akbar (Akbar, [Note]) of the Mogul dynasty in India once owned as many as a thousand cheetahs at one time, and it is said that when he was sixty-three In the past 10 years, he has raised a total of 9,000 cheetahs. Obviously, he can be regarded as one of the most extravagant people. 【Note】The greatest emperor of the Mughal Dynasty in India and the most prominent figure in the sixteenth century.Akbar was born in Umarhot, India, named Jalal ud︱Din Mohammed, the son of the second Mughal emperor Humayun.After Akbar inherited the throne, he regained the lost land and expanded abroad within 20 years, with remarkable achievements in governance. Humans did not know how to breed cheetahs in captivity until decades ago, so they have never been raised by humans, and Akbar's large herd of cheetahs should have been captured from the wild.The cheetah breeding secret has two mysterious thrusts. The first has to do with its mysterious estrous cycle; we have absolutely no way of directly observing when a female cheetah is ready to mate.Only recently have we discovered that the estrous cycle of female leopards can be determined from the excitatory behavior of male cheetahs in pens.The second important point is polyandry; a female leopard must mate with two or more male leopards to conceive. Cheetah breeding secrets were first discovered by an Italian doctor, and later, film actor Amanda.Blake (Amanda Blake) and her husband Frank.Frank Gilbert rediscovered the secret at their private experimental cheetah breeding facility in Phoenix, Arizona, where the couple bred seven generations of cheetahs before their deaths.Cheetahs are now being bred regularly in zoos, something that would have been impossible just a quarter of a century ago.