[ISL] "Prince Edward Island’s silver fox bubble"

[rfmcdonald]

At the National Post, Mark Bourrie describes Prince Edward Island's silver fox pelt boom of the 1920s. It's a story of significant, if ephemeral, achievement.

In the 19th century, Prince Edward Islanders were frugal, if poor, people. Before the fox bubble, they had one of the highest savings rates in the world. After sometimes violent confrontations with agents representing absentee land owners, by the end of the 1800s most farmers had been able to buy the land they worked.

But some Islanders looked for ways to make easy money. Silver foxes are a mutation of the common red fox. The gene for the black/silver colour is recessive, and to have a reasonable chance of breeding more silver foxes, both parents should be silver. Every once in a while, trappers caught a silver fox and sold the pelt for a jaw-dropping price. They were popular among the nobility of the Hapsburg and Russian empires, a customer base that would eventually have serious problems of its own.

Charles Dalton, a druggist from Tignish, and Robert Oulton, a New Brunswick-born farmer, began working together in a secret location on Oulton’s farm on Savage Island, near Alberton, in the 1890s to catch, domesticate and breed black foxes.

The trick was to get the foxes, which were territorial animals that didn’t adapt well to captivity, to breed. Oulton and Dalton discovered foxes are monogamous, so they built them small apartments within larger pens. They made sure the fox pens were located in quiet places and kept visitors out from January until July, since mother foxes kill their babies when they’re distressed.

Close confinement in small pens exposed the foxes to diseases, especially internal parasites, so the breeders built big, spacious enclosures with lots of room for exercise. Oulton set up his pens in copses of trees. He found a British-made wire mesh that the foxes couldn’t chew through and sank the wire deep into the ground so the foxes could not escape by tunneling.

It worked. Oulton perfected the breeding operation while Dalton quietly sold the pelts on the London market as wild-caught animals. In January, 1900, a single pelt brought $1,807 at auction, but the sheer volume of Dalton’s inventory tipped off the London fur merchants that the source of the pelts was too productive to be wild.