Word: chinchilla
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...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...
...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...
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...
...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...
...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...