Leave polecats alone! And stop slagging off weasels too!
Aso-called 'invasion of mice' — that is, one mouse seen running across our kitchen floor — has led to a campaign of technological warfare comparable to the Anglo-US attempts to exterminate al-Qa'eda. Weapons include anti-coagulant rodenticides such as bromadiolone and the even more sinister calciferol difenacoum. Personally I have no objection to mice. In fact I like them. I particularly like drawing them and have spent the weekend doing ink-andwatercolour sketches of the creatures, and other members of the Rodentia, such as shrews, weasels and stoats. Rodents — distinguished by the fact that they gnaw their food using their front incisor teeth, reduced to a single functional pair of chisels in each jaw which continue to grow throughout the life of the creature — are the most numerous of all terrestrial mammals, and are the most widely distributed. They include squirrels, rabbits and hares, rats and muskrats, the Tibetan Zokor and the African Otomys, porcupines and hamsters, chinchillas and coypus, voles and marmots.
All are interesting and many beautiful — 'backed like a weasel', as Polonius says to Hamlet, and what lithe elegance is implied in that phrase. But the mouse is the most intriguing, as we are closest to it. We have been dealing with mice for over 10,000 years, for it was about 8,000 BC that man began to cultivate the wild grasses in which mice bred. By mice, of course, we usually mean the house mouse, a greyish-brown creature about three inches long in the body. It spread from central Asia and can live anywhere, even in Antarctica, and long-haired varieties are quite at home in refrigerated cold-stores. One of my encyclopaedias refers to the mouse as 'semi-domesticated' and it easily adapts itself to human habits and appliances, so that it comes to be not so much a pet as a miniature or rival human. Chaucer, who thought a lot about mice, noted of his Prioress:
She wolde wepe, if that she sawe a mous Caught in a trappe, if it were deed or bledde.
He also observed the extraordinary natural enmity between the house mouse and the domestic cat, so that he writes in The Manciple's Tale:
Lat take a cat, and fostre hym wel with milk, And tendre flessh, and make his couche of silk And lat hym seen a mous go by the wal; Anon he weyveth milk, and flessh, and al, And every deyntee that is in that hous, Swich appetyt hath he to ete a mous.
The implication in this warfare, which Chaucer grasped, is that the cat sees himself as part of the household and the mouse as an invader and settler, who must be destroyed as part of the cat's duties. The point is superbly made by Beatrix Potter, who observed, understood and drew mice better than anyone else. In her story The Tale of Two Bad Mice, which I have just reread, the mice, Tom Thumb and his wife Hunca Munca, invade not a real house but a doll's house, which they find in the nursery behind whose skirting-board they live.
Beatrix Potter usually writes about the house mouse, or mus muscu/us as it is known, and she must have kept some pet ones; her drawings of their movements are extraordinarily accurate and vital, much more intriguing than Walt Disney's. For Disney, though a great draughtsman and by far the most influential artist of the 20th century (making Picasso seem unimportant by comparison), did not have Potter's delicate skill in keeping the balance between animality and humanity in her mice, but tipped his mice over into caricature human beings. However, as any mouse-fancier will tell you, mus muscuius is only one of three types. There is also the woodmouse or long-tailed fieldmouse, a timid creature, a little bigger than the house mouse and a much nicer colour, brownish-red with a grey-white belly. It lives in woodland, fields, hedgerows, gardens and outhouses. These are the mice (unlike our London ones) who occasionally pop into our Quantock kitchen and set off a hullabaloo. But there is also a third kind, seldom seen by most of us, the smallest of all, only two or two-and-a-half inches long, with a bright chestnut coat and white belly, known as the harvest mouse. It lives in cornfields, often high up among the stalks, moving effortlessly around them with the aid of its long tail, which operates as a fifth leg. It builds its nest several inches or even a foot above ground in the shape of a dome, from little bits and pieces of stalk glued together by its own saliva. But the position of the fragile nest is itself precarious, and when harvest time comes total ruin is imminent. Hence the setting for one of Robert Burns's finest poems, To a Mouse'. His scythe not only destroys the pendant nest but exposes the tiny creature itself:
Wee, sleekit, cow'rin, tim'rous beastie, 0 what a panic's in thy breastiel
And surveying the ruined nest, he reflects:
The best-laid schemes o' mice an' men Gang aft agley.
Alas, no chance of Nature's Social Union today: Burns could see the damage his scythe wrought, but the combine harvester destroys the nests and the mice within by the score without the driver having the slightest notion of what he has done.
It is easy to anthropomorphise mice, and a glance through our literature shows that the humanised mouse symbolises all that is small, timid and weak in nature, as when a character in Twelfth Night says, 'Good my mouse of virtue, answer me!'
But other rodents have acquired distinctive characters in human folklore, usually bad ones. Not hard to understand why the rat has a bad name. Nowadays it is used by the tabloids to designate any celeb who has just fallen out of favour, having been caught out in an orgy or other public circumstances which mean that the newspaper can libel him with impunity. Rat is a favourite subeditor's word, having only three letters and fitting easily into any headline. But rats in tabloidese are only male. On the other hand there is a shrew, a word which when applied pejoratively is invariably female. This is a very active, industrious and restless animal, which eats insects and is useful to gardeners and farmers. It has a long, twitchy snout and needle-like teeth. Not easy to see why it became a term of abuse, but it is said to be noisy and quarrelsome, like a scolding woman, and its saliva is toxic: injected into a mouse, it causes death within minutes.
Then there is the weasel, a splendid creature, more beautiful than a stoat, really, but cursed among humans with a reputation for treachery. Actually, the female weasel is famous for the heroism and tenacity with which she defends her young, ready to sacrifice her own life in the process. It may be that the opprobrium arises from nest-raiding. Shakespeare says in As You Like It, 'I can suck melancholy out of a song as a weasel sucks eggs.' But then most rodents suck other people's eggs if they can. And so do we, do we not? Finally, there is the case of the polecat. Michael Foot once notoriously apostrophised a Tory politician as 'a semi-house-trained polecat'. The politician, as it happened, had rather better manners than Mr Foot or any of the Feet. Polecats, I'd have you know, are highly respectable wild animals. Leave them alone!
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