I and a couple of friends (who should have better things to do) re-ran
that video and I downloaded it and ran it in slo-mo on realplayer. My
friend and her hubby (who don't own ferrets) were fascinated enough to
rerun it many times by which time the hubby decided it must be flaps
in the coat with the exterior just marked to look as though there were
ferrets lined up in rows. That's what I and another friend and probably
others guessed too, but I downloaded it to my laptop and wasted an hour
running it and rerunning it slowing it down to see if I could see the
flaps and count the ferrets as they fell out and ran. Not good enough
definition/quality to see exactly despite staring closely when stopping
the video. The cameraman did not help since it cut away as the ferrets
flowed on to the circus ring and started to run towards the ringmaster.

However I think although the laggard ferrets were a bit blurred, there
had to have been more than 12 but maybe as many as 15 - it's hard to
stop the video right at the end at the right place. In the full screen
version the coat obviously had sections, but even with slowing it down,
it was hard to see the ferrets fall out. The fox around the neck was
obviously used to divert attention from the coat flaps opening. I
noticed the lady who wore the coat had broad shoulders - pretty strong
looking build, and the coat plus ferrets plus fox would have weighed
about 15 x say 1.5 pounds plus (European) red female fox of 20 pounds.
European red foxes are a bit smaller than British red foxes and the
video is Italian. So the woman would only have to carry 45 pounds at
most and it would be distributed pretty evenly. The fox was obviously
to distract attention when let go first whilst she somehow pulled a
release cable to allow the ferrets to fall. On slo-mo the f's kind of
fall out in a blur. Very clever, and nice photogenic sable ferrets too!
They also didn't give you a good view of the small "cubicle" and the
coat must have been loaded up ahead of time and ready for her in it.

Must have been really amazing to see live. For those who haven't looked
at it - there's a link in a past fml post - or you can find it at
http://elrellano.com/videos_online/4624/circo-roncalli.html

The circus is based in Germany according to the main website,
http://www.roncalli.de/
where the text is in German, but when the page opens with the video
the text is in Italian.

Meryl

[Posted in FML 7014]