Around 3,000 Mink Released After Break-In At Wisconsin Farm: Police

LINCOLN, WI — Around 3,000 mink escaped from their enclosure at a northwestern Wisconsin farm late last week after someone, possibly multiple people, cut into a chain link fence, according to an email alert from police in Trempealeau County.

Police said a hole was cut into the minks' fenced enclosure at some point between late Friday night and early Saturday morning. The area has had previous similar incidents, police said, but "it has been quite some time since the last."

Mink farming in Wisconsin produced over 1,147,000 pelts in 2016, with production shrinking to around 403,000 pelts in 2020, according to a 2021 report by the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Over 100,000 female minks were bred in 2020 in the Badger State, with the average price of a pelt reaching about $33.70.

Police were not immediately responsive to Patch's request for additional information. Patch will update this story if we hear back.

Patch also reached out to the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources for more information but was referred back to police.

In 2017, Slate reported that an effort to free minks from a farm in Minnesota went "horribly wrong," with most of the 30,000 to 40,000 minks released in the wild dying.

"Farm-raised minks aren’t really able to make it in the wild," the outlet reported, saying many of them likely died due to the heat. "The ones that were recovered alive were haphazardly thrown into pens, which disrupted their social groupings and drove the minks to kill one another," Slate wrote.