Have you ever visited a mink farm? Are you interested to know more about the care farmed mink receive? Senior Truth About Fur writer Alan Herscovici asked "Les", a third-generation Nova Scotia mink farmer, to give us a personal tour and to explain the work he does during a typical year on a mink farm. In this first installment, Les explains the beginning of the mink production cycle: breeding. Welcome to Spring on a mink farm!

Truth About Fur (TaF): What does Spring mean for you on the mink farm?

Les (Nova Scotia mink farmer): Like most farmers, our production cycle begins in the Spring. As the days get longer in the first half of March, it’s breeding season for the mink.

We will have selected our breeding stock back in November/December. In choosing breeders, we take several factors into account. We are looking for size, fur colour and quality, for sure. But we are also watching for females that produce larger litters and take good care of their young.

We also want mink that are easy to handle and that thrive in the farm environment.

Not least important, we select for resistance to disease; we use blood tests to help identify the most disease-resistant animals for reproduction. We are constantly working to improve the genetic quality of our herd, for health, temperament and fur quality.

SEE ALSO: A YEAR ON A MINK FARM. PART 2: WHELPING AND WEANING

TaF: How are mink bred?

Les: It’s all natural, there’s no artificial insemination. For breeding, we bring the females to the males because they are easier to manage.

On our farm we have done something to make this much easier: instead of catching the female to move her, we developed removable and interchangeable nest boxes. When the female is in her nest box, we can close the door to her larger pen with a sliding panel. We carry her nest box, with the female in it, to the male’s pen and insert it there in place of his, after shooing the male into his pen. Then all we have to do is open the sliding panel and the party begins.

After mating, the female will return to her nest box, which is her territory. We close the sliding panel and bring her back to her pen. The whole operation is completed without handling the animals, with no trouble or stress for either mink or people!

TaF: Do males breed more than one female?

Les: Yes, each male is usually mated with about five females. When we introduce a female into a male’s pen, we watch to be sure that mating occurs and record that date. The female will be bred with a second male about a week later, because ovulation in mink is provoked by intercourse. The second mating also provides insurance in case the first male was infertile. We try to breed our females three times, for maximum assurance.

TaF: What happens next?

Les: It is important to disturb the mink as little as possible during the period when the fertilized eggs are implanting. Some producers will increase the hours of light in the barn during this period, but we find that the natural lengthening of the days is sufficient for implantation and gestation. We will also decrease the fat in the females’ diet and increase the percentage of protein during gestation.

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SEE ALSO: A YEAR ON A MINK FARM. PART 2: WHELPING AND WEANING, PART 3: GROWING UP, AND PART 4: FUR TIME

SEE ALSO: WHY IS AMERICAN MINK THE WORLD'S FAVOURITE FUR?

If you've never visited a mink farm before, now is your chance! Zimbal Mink Farm is in Wisconsin, the largest mink-producing state in the US (though Utah is not far behind). The farm is larger than most, but has one thing in common with almost every mink farm in the US: it's a family affair. Now let's meet the third and fourth generations of this mink-farming family ...

BOB ZIMBAL, third-generation mink farmer: So we’re located on the shores of Lake Michigan in Wisconsin, and Wisconsin is actually a great place to raise mink.

Raising mink is a lifestyle as much as a job and when we come out in the morning we look forward to caring for the animals and feeding them and taking care of their needs.

Sixty years ago my grandfather and my father started Zimbal Mink. Mink were just being domesticated, so there was a learning process how to care for the animals and feed the animals. As I child I always helped on the farm, and my father taught me to pay attention to the animals and look at their health and each individual mink’s needs.

My grandfather and my father were kind of pioneers in the industry, teaching and learning what it takes to raise a good-quality mink. And now we’re trying to pass that also the next generation of my sons and my nephew, as they come on to the farm.

The year really begins in the fall of the year where we select the breeders, and it’s all natural breeding on the farm. Breed them in March. And the end of April, beginning of May they have their litters. We are continually monitoring each female to see how she’s caring for those young ones. If there’s some difficulty, we can help them along, or sometimes if a mother can not take care of them, we can move them to the next animal.

SEE ALSO: A YEAR ON A MINK FARM. PART 1: BREEDING

We have a computer system which we use, and that helps us track each individual animal. Years ago when my father did it, it was all done by hand, but now it’s a computer system where we use a bar code, and we’re able to select and look for the genetic traits that we want to keep in the mink.

We look for size; size is important because it’s material that it takes to make the garment. Also we look at the quality of the hair. We’re looking for fine, soft hair on the mink, rather than coarser-type hair. And the thickness and the depth of the underfur is important.

We raise seven different colors, from black to white. There are browns, there are greys in between – lighter greys, darker greys – but we have distinct, different breeds.

Healthy Diet, Healthy Mink

A healthy mink starts with a healthy diet, and in Wisconsin we’re fortunate to have a diverse agricultural community. We have things available to us like beef, cheese, eggs, poultry.

JIM ZIMBAL, fourth-generation mink farmer: The better food helps them grow a nice thick coat, and silky. If we didn’t feed them as well, they wouldn’t turn out as well.

BOB ZIMBAL: I’m not a formally trained nutritionist, but I do work with nutritionists, and at different times of the year, the mink’s needs are different. So when a mink is reproducing, its requirements are different than when it’s growing or furring. So our food is weekly sent in to a laboratory to have it analyzed to make sure that we’re meeting the needs of the mink.

SEE ALSO: A YEAR ON A MINK FARM. WHELPING AND WEANING

The great thing about us taking these animal proteins that are not used for human consumption, we’re recycling that back into the mink industry and using that to feed the mink. So all our food is produced on our site, in our feed kitchen, keeping that food as fresh each day as possible.

We have a brand-new, state-of-the-art facility. We can open the roofs and sides and the air will flow through the building, to keep it cooler in the summer. But also we can close it up in bad weather in the winter to protect the animals from the environment.

Also this facility uses the natural light which the mink are accustomed to.

This facility is designed to make the mink comfortable, but also make it efficient for the people that are caring for the animals. So the way the bedding is put into them, the way the boxes are kept clean - things like that are designed with what’s comfortable for the animal but also what is efficient for the employees.

This facility is really a state-of-the-art facility that is going to be copied by other farmers throughout the world.

JOHN EASLEY, DVM, ranch services veterinarian: Zimbal Mink management techniques are always being developed on the farm here. They are always looking for different ways for them to produce and handle and care for these mink in a better way.

From a health standpoint, as a veterinarian, I look at how the animals are being taken care of on a daily basis.

The Zimbals are an active participant in Fur Commission USA’s Humane Herd Certification Program. During the herd certification process we look to see that the mink are being housed, cared for, fed, managed, to the criteria that are prescribed within the guidelines. By meeting those standards, they consistently produce some of the best-quality mink in the world, and that reflects on their caretaking abilities.

BOB ZIMBAL: My daughter, my son and my nephews and nieces travel the world, like Moscow, London, Milan, Hong Kong, New York, to keep up on the latest trends in the fashion industry. Really, what are these manufacturers and top designers looking for in the quality of the mink?

Buyers throughout the world expect consistent quality from us, and they’re expecting the highest standard in the world. Our quality exceeds their expectations, which makes Zimbal Mink the most sought-after brand in the world.

And it all starts here, on the farm, with our attention to detail.

[embed]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WwPsStvktks[/embed]

When people voice their opinion against fur farming it is an often used argument that farmed fur animals are wild animals and thus not suited to farm life in a cage. The argument is intriguing – but it is not correct.

The first recorded history of fur farmed mink dates back to 1860s in North America and a fox farm from about 1908 on Prince Edward Island in Canada is generally recognized as the world’s first silver fox farm. The European herd is founded on import of these North American animals with the first fur farms emerging in Norway in 1914.

The anti-fur argument then normally goes, that other animal species have been domesticated for thousands of years, which is true. But the underlying assumption to this argument, namely that domestication of animals requires thousands of years, is not true at all.

The world’s most famous research project on domestication happened to be carried out with foxes by the Russian scientist Dimitri K. Belyaev. He believed that the patterns of change observed in animals domesticated over thousands of years resulted from genetic changes which occurred in the course of selection. In 1959, Belyaev set up a long-term experiment of domestication of wild foxes and in the course of 24 years Belyalev and his team bred foxes that behaved like dogs, and literally were dependent on human contact. From an animal agriculture perspective it would be fair to characterize such animals as over-domesticated, and my point here is simply that total domestication from wild to tame animal can be done in a relatively short period of time. With regards to the fur farmed animals in Europe, there is sufficient scientific evidence that they are indeed domesticated animals.

One of the most significant differences between wild and domesticated animals is the animal’s attitude towards humans. Though exceptions may be found, it is evident that mink and foxes on European fur farms are not afraid of human contact. Today’s fur animals are totally undisturbed (unless around feeding time) when humans enter the farm. Such indifference to human beings is unthinkable in the wild.

Farmed fur animals also possess many of the other traits which are scientifically recognized as signs of domestication: They are bigger than their wild counterparts, the colors pattern changes, the litter sizes are larger, the brains are smaller, the legs are shorter, tails are curled, and ears are floppy. The latter was already pointed out by Charles Darwin who, without having any knowledge of genetics, brilliantly pointed to selection as the reason for modification of character. Animal and plant domestication was of fundamental importance for the development of Darwin’s ideas about the theory of evolution by natural selection. In the first chapter of ‘The Origin of the Species’ from 1859 he wrote: “Not a single domestic animal can be named which has not in some country drooping ears.”

In the wild only elephants has this feature.

You can read more about both Charles Darwin and Dimitri K. Belyaev’s groundbreaking but somewhat forgotten fox experiment here and here.