East Bay Express, By: David Downs, 10/15/2013
The photo looks like something out of a horror film. A long, thin animal lays dissected on a white table. Metal tools pull the animal's skin back to reveal its jellied, maroon-colored insides — all soupy, slick, and lumpy. It's the remains of a Pacific Fisher, an eight-pound member of the weasel family that's now hovering near extinction, thanks in part to illegal pot farming in the vast forests of California.
Fishers eat forest mice, and forest mice nibble the green stalks of still-maturing cannabis plants. So illicit growers who toil deep inside California's forests spread powerful rodenticides — rat poison — on the ground near their marijuana crops. The mice eat the poisonous anti-coagulants, get sick, and then the fishers eat the mice. Soon after, the furry forest weasels are melting from the inside out.
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