Regal Rodents

In Boston's Bradford Hotel last week, some 14,500 people milled through a maze of cages, inspecting hundreds of fluffy little animals with faces like rabbits and tails like anemic squirrels. The animals were chinchillas; the occasion was the Eastern show of the National Chinchilla Breeders of America, a sort of Westmin ster Kennel Club for rodents and the trade association for one of the strangest businesses in the world.

Last year the nation's 8,600 U.S. chinchilla breeders did a total business of $10 million, selling live animals to each other and to newcomers in the game. Prices are high, ranging up to $1,500 a pair, and profits are good. But nobody will really know for another five years whether the animals are actually worth anything at all.

The First Eleven. Once chinchilla was a prized fur, adorning the robes of kings and potentates. Annual world sales were as high as 78,000 skins in 1900. But gradually the mountains of South America, where the chinchilla lived, were swept almost clean, and the fur fell from fash ion. In 1923, an Anaconda mining engineer named Mathias Chapman captured eleven of the remaining wild chinchillas, brought them from the Andes to Southern California in an ice-cooled crate. He started breeding them and founded the domestic chinchilla industry. From his original eleven animals sprang virtually all the estimated 250,000 chinchillas in the U.S. today.

Since raising chinchillas is almost as easy as keeping canaries, the fad caught on fast in Southern California. The animals can be fed for $3 a year (mostly on hay and vitamin-enforced pellets), and females will bear three to 15 young a year.

One of California's biggest breeders is Los Angeles' Eugene J. Donovan, 47, a burly ex-Seabee who planned to go into mink farming after the war, then shifted to chinchillas in 1948 because he knew "there was a lot of green stuff in it." Starting with two pairs of animals, he built up his herd to 1,500 in two years by buying and breeding. He put up an $8,000 laboratory, opened seven retail outlets, started a 15-minute weekly television show to plug sales of breeding pairs, and waited for the green stuff to come in. Last year, says Donovan, it came in to the extent of $325,000, for a net of $97,000.

Other success stories are hardly less impressive. A Maine trawler skipper bought his wife a pair to keep her company while he was at sea, has since retired on the chinchilla income. A Connecticut tobacco grower took up chinchillas as a sideline, gave up his 7 5-acre tobacco farm when he began to net $20,000 a year on his animals. Pro & Con. But the breeders are careful not to make a large-scale test of the market for skins. Not for another five years or so will the U.S. chinchilla population be big enough (estimated as high as 6,000,000) for pelting. No one knows what will happen to prices then. Breeders talk glowingly of $6,000 to $10,000 coats that will wear a lifetime, but many furriers disagree. They argue that the fur is so fragile that it would wear out in a year of constant use. And there is no market anyway. A few years ago, Manhattan's Bergdorf Goodman tried for months to sell an $18,000 chinchilla coat, finally remade it into two stoles and sold them at a big loss. But chinchilla men answer that the only pelts available for coats in recent years were poor ones from animals that had died from disease or old age. They argue that at the last big chinchilla auction in 1944, prices were about the same as for mink pelts, and they foresee a market for as many as 3,000,000 pelts a year.

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