Élevage de lynx au Canada ...

[Animal 0]

Je cherchais une preuve qu'il se faisait de l'élevage de lynx au Canada... Je viens de la trouver ! :evil:


Big cats bring big bucks for lynx farmer


By DARLENE POLACHIC, Special to Farm & Country

Russell Hanson farms two quarters near Domremy, 100 miles northeast of Saskatoon, Sask. He grows some barley, as well as grass, hay and alfalfa to feed his 150 head of cattle. Until a few years ago, the Hansons also had a large hog operation, but a serious back injury forced him to look for an interesting, but less physically demanding diversification. He certainly found it.



Russell Hanson raises lynxes. Of about 40 animals, one is a Siberian lynx that will grow to weigh 80 pounds, the size of a large German shepherd dog; the others are the smaller Canadian variety which will weigh 45 to 50 pounds fully grown. Most of the cats are kept in large metal enclosures outside and remain wild.


Fluffy and Tuffy, both Canadian lynx, and Duke, a Siberian lynx, however, were bottle fed and house trained. They don't spend all their time indoors because they can't tolerate the heat for long with their heavy coats, Hanson says. But the litter-trained one-year-olds are as tame and friendly as any domestic house cat and just as rambunctious as any kitten, he says. But with one difference: In one leap after a tennis ball toy, they can clear the length of an average living room.




Both species of lynx have the characteristic black tufts on the ears and spotted coats, though the Siberian tends to be quite silvery in winter. Hanson's first Siberian lynx was purchased as a kitten from a zoo in Europe. The Canadian lynxes came from a breeder in Fort Vermillion, Alberta.

Why lynxes? "I've always liked big cats," says Hanson, "and thought a lot about trying to raise them. A number of breeders I've heard of had poor success, but I think it was probably due to poor diet."

In the wild, lynxes feed on bush rabbits and deer. Hanson's cats eat about 1.5 pounds of chicken a day. The Hansons grind the chickens up, feathers and all, in a commercial-sized meat grinder, says Eileen Hanson. Her husband buys around 15,000 old hens a year. They keep about 7,000 in a walk-in freezer. Fluffy, Tuffy and Duke were taken from their mothers at about one week and bottle fed. Commercial cat milk replacer kills lynx kittens, so Hanson had to come up with a substitute - milk replacer, blended with yogurt and various vitamins fed every 2.5 hours. "With eight kittens feeding every 2.5 hours, it was round-the-clock feeding for a while," Hanson says.

After two or three months, the kittens were put outside in a large cage. "They're very hardy," Hanson says. "Lynxes are cold weather animals so they don't need much in the way of shelter. We have good pens that are considerably larger than the legal fur farm requirements."

Lynxes tend to have good temperaments, he says. They don't fight a lot. They train to leash like a dog, and ride contentedly in a vehicle, as the Hansons discovered when they took the cats to visit school classrooms and nursing homes. "They're much like house cats - fairly affectionate. Like any other cat, the lynx is content simply to eat and sleep. In the wild, it travels around because it has to hunt to survive, but it's not really free. It must constantly sleep with one eye open. My lynxes are well fed, and they can sleep soundly with both eyes closed."

When it comes to market demand for his cats, Hanson says he has quite a few on order. One pair went to the Forestry Farm in Saskatoon, and another was purchased recently by a woman in Ottawa. "Ontario is a wide open market," he says. "There, lynxes can be kept as pets even in the city. In Saskatchewan, only someone with a fur farm licence can keep them on his property."

Hanson gets about $1,500 for one hand-raised Canadian lynx. Kittens raised by their mothers sell for $500 a piece. The Siberian lynx is more rare and valuable and can sell for around $2,000.

Hanson has plans to diversify further into exotic animals. Besides the pair of bobcats he'll be getting this summer, he also breeds wolverines, a member of the weasel family. "Wolverines are very rare and hard to get," he says. "There are as few as three for every 1,000 square miles of wilderness. Bred in captivity, they can bring as much as US$20,000 a piece. There's a big demand because movie producers are willing to pay as high as $5,000 a day to rent them." Hanson has seven wolverines; he recently sold two to a Montana wildlife photographer for $14,000.

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