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Updated: May 28, 2025
Li-chiang is a fur market of considerable importance for the Tibetans bring down vast quantities of skins for sale and trade. Lambs, goats, foxes, cats, civets, pandas, and flying squirrels hang in the shops and there are dozens of fur dressers who do really excellent tanning.
In truth, the civets are much nearer in resemblance to weasels than the otters are; and these two last are generally classed together the otters being neither more nor less than water weasels. We shall first consider the true Weasels: that is, the Weasels, Stoats, Ferrets, Polecats, and Martens.
The great development of such animals, with large numbers of hyaenas, civets, wolves, bears, and other Carnivores, in the middle and later Tertiary was probably the most effective agency in the evolution of the horse and deer and the extinction of the more sluggish races.
Conditions were not favorable for small mammals and although we could undoubtedly have caught a few civets, mongooses, and cats we did not set a line of steel traps for we expected to leave at any time. Our attention was mostly devoted to bird collecting and we obtained about two hundred interesting specimens.
It was like opening a Christmas package as we walked up the trails, for each one held interesting possibilities and the mammals of the region were so varied that surprises were always in store for us. Besides civets and polecats, we caught mongooses, palm civets, and other carnivores. The small traps yielded a new Hylomys, several new rats, and an interesting shrew.
Morning after morning I have visited such a runway and found dead along its path, what must have been all the walking, running or crawling creatures which the night before had sought the water at the bottom; pheasants, cobras, mouse-deer, rodents, civets, and members of many other groups. In some countries nooses instead of dead-falls guard the openings, but the result is equally deadly.
Among the fossils of Pikermi, Gaudry found the successive stages by which the ancient civets passed into the more modern hyaenas; through the Tertiary deposits of Western America, Marsh tracked the successive forms by which the ancient stock of the horse has passed into its present form; and innumerable less complete indications of the mode of evolution of other groups of the higher mammalia have been obtained.
Some writers class the coati with the civets, but the creature has far more of the habits and appearance of a badger than of a civet cat; and therefore, whatever the anatomists may say, we shall consider the coati a badger. But a truer form of the badger than either of the above, exists in South America extending over nearly the whole of that continent.
Civets, genets, and ichneumons are small as compared with most cats; they are fairly well distinguished by skull and tooth characters; their claws are never fully retractile, and many have scent glands, as in the civets. No member of this family is American.
The civets, it is true, are not usually classed with the weasels, but form a group of themselves; however, they are much more nearly related to weasels than the gluttons; and where, as in the present case, it is desirable to divide the mammalia into large groups, they will stand very well together.
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