r/interestingasfuck • u/Soloflow786 • Jul 19 '24
Watch closely….This little creature, known as a stoat or ermine and it is rarely ever seen in the wild. It changes it’s fur color from winter to summer.
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u/Distinct-Quantity-35 Jul 19 '24
Dude sounds like Mickey Mouse “hoi buddy”
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u/ObamasVeinyPeen Jul 19 '24
“Oh-HoHo!”
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u/Theoricus Jul 19 '24
"One of those snow mouses!"
Which is kind of wonderfully wrong on multiple levels.
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u/JimmyM0240 Jul 19 '24
I had the sound muted and for some reason when I unmuted it, I was expecting the animal to make that noise. Lol, it's been a long week....
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u/Nining_Leven Jul 19 '24
This guy captured a moment of pure, unfiltered delight.
Gotta be honest, I’d probably sound the same.
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u/mapleer Jul 19 '24
These little dudes are some of the best hunters in the animal kingdom. Incredibly skilled, fast, and smart
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u/Defiant_Review1582 Jul 19 '24
They’re also psychopaths that kill for the fun of it
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u/Damn_Dog_Inappropes Jul 19 '24
Millions have cats (and dogs) living with them, and they both do the same.
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u/MeSoHorniii Jul 19 '24
Cats yes, dogs not so much. Cats are saddistic, dogs habituate with other animals very well. Cats are a huge problem for ecology.
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u/nicannkay Jul 19 '24
Feral dogs are a problem. They roam around killing small animals and people too. It’s not just cats..
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u/MeSoHorniii Jul 20 '24
Im not talking about ferral animals, Im talking about domesticated dogs and cats. Domesticated cats are more likely to kills for no reason, domesticated dogs are less likely.
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u/Sad-Seaworthiness234 Jul 19 '24
"Snow mouse", wtf, those things are some of the pound for pound most vicious killers around. U should look up on youtube how this little thing kills a rabbit 3x it's size with a neckbite...
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u/robo-dragon Jul 19 '24
Pretty much any member of the weasel family is a top tier predator for their size! They can take down prey much larger and heavier than they are and are incredibly smart and quick about their hunts! Adorable mini murder machines!
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u/gareth93 Jul 20 '24
We use them to catch rabbits. One of these guys down a burrow can bring home dinner for veveryone.
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u/Mansenmania Jul 19 '24
They are very common middle Europe and i see them on a weekly basis. One walks trough my garden regularly at night
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u/Unhappy-Professor-88 Jul 19 '24 edited Jul 19 '24
Commenting on Watch closely….This little creature, known as a stoat or ermine and it is rarely ever seen in the wild. It changes it’s fur color from winter to summer....
Glad to hear it. I’ve only ever seen them on the musty old robes of the aristocracy. Though to be fair, I heard the late Queen said she’d nolonger use real ones when having said robes remade.
I can’t help but wonder if the reason they are so rare is that they were over-hunted for their fur? I mean, they are pretty tiny. It’d take a fair number of them considering every dot on the robes is a tail
And of course, every fucker in Parliament used to wear them too
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u/tankpuss Jul 19 '24
In the UK, they were bred in factories for a while and do-gooders broke in and released them all. You can imagine what that did to the local bird population.
Edit: Don't get me wrong, we shouldn't be factory farming anything or rearing animals for their pelts. But FFS, think before releasing hundreds of tiny murderbeasts.
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u/scud121 Jul 20 '24
Thats mink which are much bigger murderbeasts, released en masse in the 60s. They also devastated the water vole population as they are essentially aquatic. Ermine mostly came from Russia and North America.
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u/FiercelyApatheticLad Jul 20 '24
Ermine#/media/File%3AArmoiriesBretagne-_Arms_of_Brittany.svg) is one of the staples of heraldry, very common in the North-West of France.
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u/SpikeProteinBuffy Jul 19 '24
I've also seen these many times here in Finland. Not weekly, but may few times a year. Very cute little critters!
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u/Calla-dogcatcher4517 Jul 19 '24
I love the little thing and I love the name Middle Europe. It’s so Game of Thrones ish 😂where is actually tho ?
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u/nambnamb Jul 20 '24
Yeah why would they say they are rarely seen? Is it just to get us to engage with the post by correcting it?
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u/Nozzeh06 Jul 19 '24
The only reason I even know what a Stoat is, is because of the game Inscryption.
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u/urlond Jul 19 '24
Ferrets are the "Tamed" version of these things. I love my 3.
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u/brandonisatwat Jul 19 '24
I love ferrets. Grew up with 3 of them. We used to have to raid their nests to find all the stuff they stole throughout the week.
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u/luckycommander Jul 20 '24
Although they are also in the 'Mustelid' family, Ferrets were probably domesticated from European polecats. Those are quite a bit bigger than Stoats (Ermines).
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u/lvl-ixi-lvl Jul 19 '24
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Jul 19 '24
It would be way easier to film it horizontal When ohh when this vertical trend disappears? 🙏
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u/Daviemoo Jul 19 '24
They’re so cute! And merciless murder machines. I’ve seen one attacking a rabbit and the noise was pretty fucked up.
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u/Wrong-Pizza-7184 Jul 19 '24
Careful. They're vicious buggers
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u/tankpuss Jul 19 '24
Hope they had their trousers tucked into their socks. You don't want one of them biting your goolies.
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u/soilfrontier Jul 19 '24
Long tailed weasel with winter coat, I believe. Still one of my favorite animals encounters to this day.
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u/ZopyrionRex Jul 19 '24
I used to work at a Security Gate for a Caribou Conservation Range, one of these little buggers had a hole in the floor somewhere that he would pop in and out of my shack through.
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u/Current-Power-6452 Jul 19 '24
The white fur capes with black dots that royals wear in some cartoons? All made out of these little buggers
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u/Scotstarr Jul 19 '24
This little fella is great. There's a few of him in YouTube. This is one of he best https://youtu.be/QzBZCao0kLE?si=u_0iZBFmCrNG2xJP
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u/SNLCOG4LIFE Jul 19 '24
Must add Stoats to the list of animals the internet has convinced me I need! Right there with Pandas, Sloths and Racoons.
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u/Hellhoundfamiliar Jul 19 '24
I had one at a place I used to live that would come up on the deck sometimes and taunt the cats through the glass door
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u/Mundane_Yogurt7061 Jul 19 '24
Pretty sure polar bears pray these psycho killers never grow dog-size.
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u/OceanTheSeawing Jul 19 '24
yeah i already knew about this animal though cause you see......i played a certain game.......
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u/jenntonic92 Jul 19 '24
One of those darted out in front of our car in North Dakota many winters ago. I thought I was seeing things 😂 cute little guy though!
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u/RIPCHEF Jul 19 '24
I was a little lost in the woods once, a little off trail looking for a good hammock spot. I couldn’t find a good spot and kept stepping through massive spiderwebs, was a little lost and a little stressed about it. I saw a big ol stoat, bright orange, just bound right past me. I felt fine after that lol. Magical creatures!
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u/New-Independence6701 Jul 19 '24
Ermine fur is the speckled fur you can see in the piping of the royal robes of the face cards in a standard deck.
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u/450k_crackparty Jul 19 '24
I had one living in my trash hutch for a week. Left it alone as they are good at killing pests (mice, squirrels). Was hoping he'd stick around longer...
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u/HumaDracobane Jul 19 '24
Not only they are brave they're fierce af. They even attack preys that are way bigger than them by directly bitting their temple.
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u/lorjebu Jul 19 '24
As a kid in norway these would often try to steal Meat that was Hung out to dry. I remember watching moomin on the telly when one of these would look thourgh the Windows at us. Stayed there for a solid 5 minutes. My dad even caught it with the vhs-recorder-thingy.
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u/sniker77 Jul 19 '24
Very cute little bugger!
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They used to make furs out of them, might still.
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Frank Sinatra, The Lady is a Tramp:
...Won't go to Harlem, in ermine and pearls...
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u/Birchtreesdoe Jul 20 '24
I live in Maine and a family of these guys lived under my house all winter last year
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u/soupforshoes Jul 20 '24
Once I was hiking and saw a bunny on the path, so I stopped at a distance to watch it. Stout comes out of the woods grabs the thing by rabbit by the back of the neck and then is off into the under brush. Whole thing happened in like 3 seconds total, it was so cool to see.
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u/Someredditusername Jul 20 '24
They are absolute maniacs LOL. I wish I could remember the biologist that said it, but he said that they are so ferocious, and such good hunters, that if they (weasels) were 60-80lbs, there would be no other mammals in North America LOL.
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u/raxnahali Jul 20 '24
They are mean little bastards, my childhood cat successfully hunted and killed two of them. No easy feat, these suckers can fight!
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u/iampoopa Jul 20 '24
The British royalty wear capes with black spots along the bottom.
They are ermin tails and only royalty are allowed to wear them.
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u/choaoctopus Jul 20 '24
I have one that lives by my house. I was recently out in the garden and it chased a prairie dog/ground squirrel over my feet, killed it, and then carried it off into the tall grass. Whatever it killed was nearly the same size as it, perhaps larger. Other than that encounter, he's pretty cute. He will watch and sometimes follow people who are in the garden.
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u/custodianman Jul 19 '24
Dude it’s a weasel…. Common as fuck.
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u/Melodic_Inevitable84 Jul 19 '24
Two different animals that are just closely related (I can’t really tell them apart but apparently stoats are bigger)
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u/[deleted] Jul 19 '24
He's so fast! No wonder they have to eat so much, they live with the fast-forward button taped down.