Q:"So what's the difference between "regular" ferrets, angora ferrets, and
european shorthair ferrets? How long have the latter two breeds existed,
and where did they originate?"
A: Regular ferrets go poopie like clockwork.
Do you want a "ferret club" answer or a scientific answer? If the first,
I'm the wrong person to ask because I have little patience for colors and
breeds and other inherently silly questions. I would much rather discuss
inherently bhoring questions, such as the scientific basis of breeds.
Regarding the idea that the number of breeds correlate to the length of
domestication. Domestication is a process which is almost exclusively
controlled by humans and is thus not considered by many to be a "natural"
process. Of course it is, for excluding the selective agent (humans),
the rest of the process is virtually identical. Which mean, the *RATE*
of change is correlated to the *DEGREE* of selection and its *INTENSITY*,
and therefore is not time dependant. In other words, the length of
domestication *HAS NO BEARING* on the degree of change (it does, but is
so gradual when compared to intensive human selection that it fades to
unimportance). So, counting up the number of breeds and attempting to
correlate them to length of domestication will not work.
Using dogs for example, they have been domesticated at least 20,000 years,
and new genetic evidence suggests it may be for as long as 50,000 years.
Yet, the majority of modern dog breeds are less than 400 years old, with
the majority less than 200 years old. The same pattern is true with cats,
cattle, rabbits, goats, and horses in that one or two breeds developed
gradually over a long period of time, and then, with the advent of animal
husbandry techniques, the number of breeds have dramatically increased.
Some breeds are clearly the result of a chance mutation, such as with
angora fur, albinism, and extra toes, but mostly specific traits are due to
inbreeding. These changes can occur quite rapidly; a Soviet experiment was
able to produce the majority of dog-like domestication traits in only a few
generations, including pie-bald coloration, barking, bonding to humans,
increased reproductive ability, and skull changes. What is even more
surprizing is it wasn't done in wolves, as you might expect, but in fox.
Now, this was admittedly intensive human selection, but the point is it
was done with selective and intensive inbreeding.
What this means is, anyone with a love of the unusual, such as cats lacking
forearm bones so they hop around like kangaroos, can successfully produce a
breed. So what is a "breed?" Well, it ISN'T a species, that's for sure.
If you collected pens from all the stores in town and called the collection
a "species," how would you deal with the pens that wrote in black compared
to those that wrote in red? Or, how would you deal with plastic pens
compared to metal? Or retractables compared to capped ends? Clearly, the
difficulty in defining a species is not the recognition of the group, but
what to do with the variation within the group. Do you have one thing or
two? Or three? Variation is the key to health of a species, because it
allows for evolutionary change and minimizes extinction. All a breed is,
is natural variation magnified by human-selected breeding.
Am I telling you that the genes that result in poodles, dobermans, spaniels
and Boston bulls exist in wolves as a whole? Absolutely. Grab all the
wolves you can find and you will see, at a minature level perhaps, every
trait that exists in domestic dogs today (exculding those clearly resulting
from mutations--which are few). Of course, those domestic traits are
*VERY* pronounced by generations of selective breeding, so they are
magnified many, many times. Clearly, scientifically, the wolf and the
dog are the same, just as the ferret and the polecat are identical. The
difference is not so much the DNA as the ratios of one type of gene to
another. In other words, wolves and ferrets have the same DNA as their
wild kin, but the ratios of a few specific genes vary between the wild and
domesticated populations.
As for breeds, we can all recognize the difference between a shepard and a
chihuahua, so we assume there is a real difference. Breeds not only have
some specific coloration, they also have a specific morphology, such as
head shape, leg length, etc. They will also breed "true" when bred among
themselves. Also, breeds are essentially defined by some organizing body,
and since ferretdom lacks a vital and recognizable all-encompassing club,
its a moot point. One thing is for sure; I don't see the amount of
variation that exists within the various "types" of ferrets, be they
bulldog, whippet, angora or whatever, to be anything more than variation
slightly biased to one particular area. For example, all the different
color patterns, sizes and body shapes of ferrets are generally not as
extensive as the variation found among the various "true" breeds of cats,
such as the tabbies or the Siamese. Angoras are ferrets with long hair,
bulldogs are stocky ferrets and whippets are skinny ferrets. I don't think
any one of these constitutes a breed, but even if I did, since ferrets do
not hold pedigrees, we do not have published breed books, and we lack a
centralized governing body that defines breeds, there would be no
recognition of it anyway.
Finally, since breeds are the result of intensive inbreeding, there is
always the serious problem of having a bad trait linked to a good one, so
that breeding for the one trait also results in the other. There is no
telling how many animals are destroyed in an effort to obtain that "special
breed," but just get a Merick Manual and you can read about the hundreds of
specific breed problems found in cats and dogs. The bottom line is, there
is only one "breed" of ferrets, displaying a remarkable diversity of
coloration, slight variation in body morphology, and even slighter
difference in fur quality; not enough to constitute a "breed" even if
there was an agency to recognize it and pedigrees to prove it.
Bob C and 20 Mo' Ragin' Raslers
[Posted in FML issue 2550]
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