I suspect it is only in the world of John Fairfax that managing a mink farm is boring.
The researchers in Novosibirsk who domesticated the foxes also worked with less charismatic animals, including mink. If you want to read something short specifically about the mink, search for "Have fur bearers become domesticated (behavioural and brain biochemistry aspects)" and you will get a 290 page PDF that contains this note on a few pages.
The numbers in Table 1 show that domesticating mink was extremely difficult, and that at the time of preparing the article only .03% of the mink they had (5/17,500) were all the way on the "fully domesticated" end of their scale (the fox experiment was enormously more successful). The relevant bit to your comment is that they also bred a strain of super-aggressive mink. I will quote their mink-aggressiveness scale, because the descriptions of angry mink are wonderful (there are a few missing words in the original; I blame difficulty of proofreading when none of the authors was a native English speaker):
–Score 1. Fearful response towards human. When attempts were made to catch the caged mink, it retreated, hid in its wooden kennel, gaping and baring its teeth, cried shrilly or hissed, its posture showed intense emotional stress.
–Score 2. Attack from the wooden kennel. When attempts were made to catch the caged mink, it jumped to the entrance of wooden kennel, hid in it to attack the gloved hand, bit it with considerable intensity.
–Score 3. Active attack outside shelter. When attempts were made to catch the caged mink, instead of hiding, promptly attacked the hand. Even after the test was over, it kept crying, gnawed in fierce assault the bars of the cage at the sight the approaching gloved hand.
–Score 4. Attacks enhancing in response to human approach. Before test onset, i.e. before the breeder opened the cage and stretched out his hand, the caged mink vehemently responded to human presence by about the cage, gnawing its bars.
Moral of the story: Mink can be really nasty, but with selective breeding you can make them even nastier.
Mink
The researchers in Novosibirsk who domesticated the foxes also worked with less charismatic animals, including mink. If you want to read something short specifically about the mink, search for "Have fur bearers become domesticated (behavioural and brain biochemistry aspects)" and you will get a 290 page PDF that contains this note on a few pages.
The numbers in Table 1 show that domesticating mink was extremely difficult, and that at the time of preparing the article only .03% of the mink they had (5/17,500) were all the way on the "fully domesticated" end of their scale (the fox experiment was enormously more successful). The relevant bit to your comment is that they also bred a strain of super-aggressive mink. I will quote their mink-aggressiveness scale, because the descriptions of angry mink are wonderful (there are a few missing words in the original; I blame difficulty of proofreading when none of the authors was a native English speaker):
–Score 1. Fearful response towards human. When
attempts were made to catch the caged mink, it retreated, hid in its wooden kennel, gaping and baring its teeth, cried shrilly or hissed, its posture showed intense emotional stress.
–Score 2. Attack from the wooden kennel. When attempts were made to catch the caged mink, it jumped to the entrance of wooden kennel, hid in it to attack the gloved hand, bit it with considerable intensity.
–Score 3. Active attack outside shelter. When attempts were made to catch the caged mink, instead of hiding, promptly attacked the hand. Even after the test was over, it kept crying, gnawed in fierce assault the bars of the cage at the sight the approaching gloved hand.
–Score 4. Attacks enhancing in response to human approach. Before test onset, i.e. before the breeder opened the cage and stretched out his hand, the caged mink vehemently responded to human presence by about the cage, gnawing its bars.
Moral of the story: Mink can be really nasty, but with selective breeding you can make them even nastier.