Country diary 1924: No mercy shown to the stoat and weasel

CUMBERLAND: No mercy is shown to the stoat and weasel. They are ferocious beasts . Watch one as it "chitters" at you from a hole in a stone wall, and you never cease to wonder that its glittering eyes should suggest such an impression of impudence, cruelty, evil, and malice. Evil, of course, they do, and were it not that they are easily trapped they would soon become the greatest of all the pests on which the keeper wages war. Place a slate slantways against a wall, put a trap on the ground underneath it, and before long you find yourself rid of another of the creatures whose craving for blood is greater than you can afford to satisfy.

Is it inquisitiveness or is it the desire for cover that makes the stoat and weasel take the dark way where there is a trap set for them? Or is it they know the prey they seek will sometimes pass under or shelter behind the slate? It goes without saying that the stoat and weasel have their uses. They keep down the rats for man, and they provide the fox and buzzard, not to mention other carrion-eaters, with rabbit food. To the fox especially they do many a good turn.