10
Elsie Young describes the work involved in feeding her family's foxes.When you tended the fox ranch, what did you have to do besides feeding. They were quite tempermental animals weren't they?
Yes, we had to be very careful. A stranger couldn't go in when they had their young, because they would eat them.
Charlie said one time you had to tend them?
Oh yes when he went to Sydney. After the girls got through school they wanted to go to college. So he went to Sydney and I had 100 foxes. And I use to have the food come up from Yarmouth on the boat and it was in blocks frozen hard. And all tied around with wire. I'd have to cut that open and let it thaw up and then I'd put it in the grinder and grind it and mix it up with some kind of meal. I use to have four or five big pails of food, put it in a wheelbarrow and take it down. That's after I moved down here. Take it down and feed the foxes. And I had the switch board at the same time, and the girls use to tend that while I was feeding the foxes.
Was fox farming quite lucrative?
Oh yes. At that time, but then it just went right flat. And then mink came in.
From an interview conducted in 1987 by Dorothy Outhouse
11
Island fox ranches were of great interest to the tourists that came to the Islands in the 1930s and 1940s. They would like to tour the ranches, and if the pups were old enough to be out of danger [their mothers would eat them if they were upset by the scent of strangers], owners would allow the tourists to go through. One tourist asked the question " How many pelts do you get from each fox ?" Apparently the lady felt that a fox was somewhat like a sheepand could be pelted each year in the same manner as a sheep was sheared.
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