I'll give you a bit of the information I've learned.  The ferret either
was first domesticated in Africa or it wasn't.  The debate is whether a
European or African weasel became the domestic ferret.  The ferret was
the first animal brought into peoples homes to deal with rats and mice.
Several of the oldest 'fables' about 'cats are really about ferrets in
fact.   Egypt is one of the earliest known places ferrets where used I
believe.
 
Moving ahead a few hundred years...  The Real color of a ferret is the
albino color.  The other colors came from cross breeding with various
European polecats.  The Sable is the color of the polecat found in
England if I remember correctly.  In the first part of this century
ferrets in this country were still used to clear the rats out of
buildings.  A.R. Harding wrote several articles and bools about ferrets
around the 1930s and 40s.  He referred to the albino ferrets as English
ferrets and the Sable ferrets as Fitch-ferrets.  Now people use
fitch-ferret and polecat-ferret interchangeably (the cross between
ferrets and polecats)
 
I got most of this in a single trip to the local library.  I did have to
rummage through side trips in the card catalog and the local libraries
computerized indexing system to get some of this.  It is also late at
mnight which explains the rambling aspect of this post....:)
 
bil and diane killian
zen and the art of ferrets
[Posted in FML issue 1170]