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This chapter suggests that the choice of the weasel as the Rescuer in Alcmene's story was not made by chance, but was the result of a sense of the weasel's identity that emerged from the stories that were told about it. The complex of beliefs about the weasel permitted the creation of many possible figures, including an animal that could help the Woman in Labor. The weasel was an animal good for thinking about childbirth because it offered a complex of symbolic elements that already had a privileged relationship with birth.

Black-footed ferrets are in the same family as badgers but aren't in the same class as diggers. Long, low, and slender, they find prairie dog tunnels to be just their size. So they simply move into a home a dog has dug, and evict or eat any occupant. Like other weasels, they eat both summer and winter, so a family of ferrets can make a big dent in the numbers of their immediate neighbors. Natural selection molded it, body and behavior, into a prairie dog-killing machine; but in giving the ferret that singular success, natural selection pruned away all its other options. The black-footed ferret has become one of the rarest and most endangered mammals on earth.

This chapter focuses on the midwife in Alcmene's tale—a character for whom the Rescuer could be considered a mythological projection. This character not only helps us find possible connections between the dissonant aspects of the weasel in the story but also understand the cultural meaning of the Rescuer's cunning.

This chapter shows that the weasel is regarded as a woman not only in the Roman world but also in many other cultures across Europe. The story of Alcmene emerges as only one tale within a more general narrative complex about the weasel-woman, a complex that includes a group of Greek legends. It explains why the weasel is called “godmother” in so many European languages and dialects—in Spain, Bulgaria, Germany, Sardinia, and elsewhere. It also considers the resemblance of the ancient Greek word for weasel to the word for husband's sister, another story which casts the weasel in the role of a female relative.

This chapter analyzes the story of Alcmene and the weasel. It considers different versions of Alcmene's tale as told by Pausanias, Ovid, Libanius, Antoninus Liberalis, Aelian, and Istros. It also discusses the significance of the myth of Galanthis, the woman/weasel who helped Alcmene during her impossible delivery.

This chapter considers the Resolution of Alcmene's story involving a weasel. It looks for possible connections between the weasel's cultural identity and its role in Alcmene's story as the helper of a woman in labor. It also discusses the relevance of the weasel's methods of conceiving and giving birth.

This chapter synthesizes what we have learned about the weasel and explores greater detail her connection to the world of women and childbirth. It examines the legend of the weasel's oral birth and its extraordinary agility; the particular physical characteristics and behaviors of the weasel that make it especially suitable as a symbolic expression for pregnancy and childbirth; and analogies between the weasel and the opossum and their links to the world of birth.

This chapter considers the possibility that one of the traits of the weasel deemed harmonious—giving birth through the mouth—might actually cause unexpected dissonance. There is another animal suspected of giving birth in the same unnatural fashion: the crow. Pliny elaborates on the information offered in Aristotle, asserting not only that the crow copulates with its mouth but also that it gives birth through its mouth. How then can we explain that the weasel, an animal that, like the crow, gives birth through the mouth, was, unlike the crow, considered good for women in labor?

This chapter argues that an animal resides within a complex and active world made up of overlapping discourses or of interrelated stories. It would be futile to look for the perfect point of intersection of all the stories involving a given animal. However, there are points of intersection in which an animal's identity in one story emerges as a factor in another story. This, in fact, is what has been shown for the weasel, illustrating the points of intersection between her role in the story of Alcmene's labor and other stories in which the weasel slips in and out of narrow spaces, or when the weasel herself gives birth through the mouth.

This chapter focuses on the ancient beliefs and folklore about the weasel. It shows the extraordinary quantity of unusual habits associated with the weasel, its symbolic meanings and connotations, and all the stories and legends in which this little animal was involved in years gone by.

Scientific writing should be rigorous but also needs to avoid monotony. The judicious use of adverbs can greatly enhance both communicative quality and reader engagement. This chapter presents strategies for writing interesting prose without sacrificing neutrality.

Marianne Moore treats humor as a way to recognize what we have in common with others and to create understanding across difference. In her early work, Moore experiments with combinations of satire and empathy. In “A Prize Bird” and “The Wood-Weasel,” she uses humor as a test of friendship, and suggests that sympathetic laughter constitutes a distinctively American approach to collaborative artistic creation. Humor in “The Pangolin,” like the artists’ tools Moore discusses in the poem, is an end in itself and a way to discover new possibilities: it marks shared humanity and unites the human with the divine. Moore’s laughter occurs when we understand intuitively what it is like to be someone else; the more apparently unlike us the other, the more satisfying the laughter. Throughout Moore’s work, humor can be read as an ars poetica, modeling the synthesis of diverse components that she performs in her poetry.

Ambrose’s account in his Hexameron of the mating habits of the Viper attests his conviction that human bodies functioned in the same way as the bodies of nonhuman animals as regards sex and the senses. Such a resemblance between human and animal continues to challenge and shape the idea of the human in the psychoanalytic theory of the drives. A patristic tag describing man as born “between urine and feces” was cited by Freud, reflecting on maturation as a process of becoming human, and then used by Anzieu as the title of a short story recounting birth as the passage from filth into a library. This chapter explores the tension between bodily orifices and the library as it is activated in bestiaries that provoke anxiety about sexuality as part of their appeal to the reader of a book. It links the notion of involucrum from the previous chapter to Derrida’s concept of invagination, as it follows the continuum between bodily recesses and the bestiary page. The chapter concentrates particularly on the presentation of the Hyena and Beaver, and the Weasel and Asp, especially in manuscripts of the Dicta Chrysostomi and the bestiary of Guillaume le Clerc.

This chapter reviews the basic principles of predation, addresses whether predation is both necessary and sufficient to determine population growth rates in small rodents, and analyzes some empirical studies of predation in small rodents. These include a study on predator impact on the high brown lemming population in Barrow, Alaska; experimental predator reduction experiments in western Finland; and a weasel removal experiment in Scotland.

This chapter reviews the ecology of the three species of small mustelids introduced into New Zealand: the ferret (Mustela furo), the stoat (M. erminea) and the weasel (M. nivalis), for biological control of rabbits. New Zealand offers a mosaic of environments totally different from those in which the three species evolved, including a diminishing array of endemic fauna especially vulnerable to mammalian predators. Mustelids in New Zealand display significant adaptive flexibility in diet, habitat selection, co-existence, dispersal, body size, population biology and predatory impact, with results contrasting with those observable in their northern-hemisphere ancestors. These evolutionary and ecological responses by mustelids to new opportunities are of considerable interest to evolutionary ecologists, especially those interested in competition and predator-prey relationships. Likewise, the need to protect New Zealand’s native fauna has stimulated extensive research on alternative options for mitigating the effects of invasive predators, applicable to pest management problems in other countries.

The dependency of mustelid demographic rates on prey abundance has the potential to cause a strong coupling between predator-prey populations. Data on mustelid dynamics show that such strong reciprocal interactions only materialise in some restricted conditions. Bite-size mustelid predators searching for scarce, depleted prey expose themselves to increased risk of predation by larger predators of small mammal that are themselves searching for similar prey species. As voles or muskrats become scarcer, weasels and mink searching for prey over larger areas become increasingly exposed to intra-guild predation, unless they operate in a habitat refuge such as the sub-nivean space. Where larger predators are sufficiently abundant or exert year-round predation pressure on small mustelids, their impact on mustelids may impose biological barrier to dispersal that are sufficient to weaken the coupling between small mustelids and their rodent prey, and thus impose a degree of top down limitation on mustelids.

Schwartz’s chapter deploys historical listening as a critical and creative methodology. It opens with the sound of the whistling of dying horses as a means of generating a panoply of war-related homophones and connotations, inviting us to hear the decline of shrilling round shot on the battlefield and the ascendency of spiralled, hissing bullets. The chapter’s centerpiece is an extended analysis of “Pop Goes the Weasel,” one of the most whistled tunes in wartime Britain. Venturing an explanation for the refrain’s ubiquity, it argues that its “lexical potential energy could be enlisted to do highly kinetic, cultural work in dozens of contexts”—including military, political, literary, and scientific contexts, across and between which the idea of potential energy emerged.