Watch it as long as you like, and I do not
believe that you will see it eating anything of an animal nature.
I mention this fact because it is often held up to blame as a
mischievous animal, especially deserving the wrath of anglers by
devouring the eggs and young of fish.
As is often the case in the life-history of animals as well as of men,
the blame is laid on the wrong shoulders. If the destruction of fish be
a crime, there are many criminals, the worst and most persistent of
which are the fish themselves, which not only eat the eggs and young of
other fish, but, Saturn-like, have not the least scruple in devouring
their own offspring.
Scarcely less destructive in its own insidious way is the common
house-rat, which eats everything which according to our ideas is edible,
and a good many which we might think incapable of affording sustenance
even to a rat. In the summer time it often abandons for a time the
house, the farm, the barn, and seeks for a change of diet by the brook.
These water-haunting creatures are naturally mistaken for the
vegetable-feeding water-vole, and so the latter has to bear the blame of
their misdoings.
Pages:
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30