Monday, September 14, 2009
SOMEBODY asked me the other day "What’s a ferret?"
At this stage I’ve become quite used to being asked odd questions so I did my best to answer. A ferret, I explained, "is a domesticated polecat".
This was greeted by a blank look that demanded some further explanation. A polecat, I continued, is not a cat. It’s a member of the family of animals that includes the stoat, pine marten and otter. In the past, people thought these animals were related to cats, although they’re not. An old Irish name for a pine marten is a ‘marten cat’ and the juvenile members of the family are still called ‘kits’.
The European polecat is found over most of Europe and has been making a comeback in Britain. It’s not found in Ireland and I know of no evidence suggesting it was in the past.
Polecats were domesticated at least 2,500 years ago. Originally this was probably for the same reason that wild cats were domesticated – to protect grain stores from rats and mice. But fairly soon other uses were found for them.
Ferrets have very short legs and long, sinuous bodies, rather like stoats. But they’re much bigger than stoats, a male can weigh up to two kilos, though females are only about half the size. This makes them ideal for inserting into rabbit burrows to flush out the inhabitants.
As rabbits spread across Europe, aided firstly by the expansion of the Roman Empire and latterly by the Normans, who brought them to Ireland, ferrets were increasingly used to hunt them. Hunting rabbits with ferrets still goes on in Ireland, though it’s nothing like as common as it used to be.
There are different ways of going about it but they are all based on the fact that a rabbit burrow normally has several entrances. You put a ferret in at one entrance and wait for the rabbits to pop out of the others.
In the past nets were used to catch the rabbits and fast dogs, such as lurchers, to chase down any that escaped the nets. Nowadays shotguns may be used.
The only disadvantage to this is occasionally a badly-behaved ferret will kill a rabbit underground and then settle down to a feast. For this reason ferreting people usually carry a spade.
The commonest modern use for ferrets is as pets and this is popular in some parts of the world. They can even be house trained. There is, in fact, a long tradition of ferrets as pets. There is a portrait of Queen Elizabeth I of England with her pet white ferret. The artist has added in some black spots to make the animal look like an ermine.
An ermine is a stoat in its black and white winter coat (in Ireland they don’t change colour in the winter, though they do in northern Scotland) and its fur was associated with royalty and nobility. But the animal in the picture is a ferret. Leonardo da Vinci’s painting ‘Lady with an Ermine’ is also wrongly labelled because the animal is a ferret.
Electricians have used the animal’s love of exploring burrows to thread cables down long conduits. Several organisers of large events have ferrets trained to do this.
An intact male ferret is a ‘hob’, a female a ‘jill’, a neutered male is a ‘gib’ but a vasectomised one is a ‘hoblet’ and a spayed female is a ‘sprite’. A group of ferrets is called a ‘business’, though the old word for it was a ‘fesnyng’.
* dick.warner@examiner.ie
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