Pampered Rodent

The U.S. Department of Agriculture has many vexing problems. Last week it had a stopper: a chinchilla with "the slobbers." Its front teeth had grown so long that it could not eat. Agriculture experts did what they could, but the sick chinchilla had slobbered too long; it died of malnutrition.

The appeal was the first of its kind, but Agriculture was prepared for more: chinchilla breeding in the U.S. is growing by hops and scurries. Some 2,000 U.S. breeders now own about 30,000 chinchillas. A Manhattan company advertises (and presumably sells) mated pairs for $1,500. So valuable are chinchillas that few except the sick or sterile are killed for their down-soft pelts. Breeders find it more profitable to sell them on the paw.

Soft to Touch. Chinchillas are squirrel-sized rodents with wrinkly noses and turned-up tails. They are native to the high, dry, hot & cold Andes. To protect themselves from the fierce changes in temperature, chinchillas developed a remarkable platinum-grey coat with as many as 80 marvelously fine hairs springing from every follicle. So soft is chinchilla fur that a blindfolded person sometimes cannot tell when his hand is brushing it. The close-set hairs foil fleas, which cannot maneuver through them to blood-bearing strata below.

The ancient Incas fully appreciated chinchillas; they wore the skins and ate the flesh. Sometimes the Incas sheared them like tiny sheep, wove thistledown cloth of their "wool." In the late 19th Century, a rage for chinchilla swept the world of fashion--and furriers soon swept the Andes bare of the little animals.

Hard to Market. In 1923, a U.S. engineer named M. F. Chapman brought eleven chinchillas to California where they became the progenitors of practically all U.S. chinchillas. They proved not excessively hard to raise. They live on cheap vegetables rather than expensive meat. Unlike mink, they do not tear one another to bits. They have no unpleasant odor nor do they bite the hand that feeds them. In their wild state, the males are monogamous; but on the fur ranch, they can be persuaded into polygamy. A female can produce three annual litters of one to five offspring.

Chinchilla breeders cherish their charges, sometimes pampering them with special food pellets and air-conditioning systems. But the market is risky. It takes about 150 pelts to make one full-length coat. Until pelts fall far below the present price of live chinchillas, furriers are not interested. Manhattan's I. J. Fox made up one coat, which it priced at $25,000. That coat is still unsold, says I. J. Fox: "We got a lot of publicity out of it. You can have it for next to nothing."

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