Sorry about the last minute postponing of the trip to DC/NY/Pittsburgh
Museums; my mom slipped in the shower breaking her left hip.  The femoral
neck snapped, and the acetabular cup was crushed.  The best recourse was a
total hip replacement, which was done yesterday.  She went through the
surgery fine, but is kind of loopy from the drugs.  She was pretty depressed
before the fall from the death of my dad, and was on some meds to help her
sleep, which may have been a factor in the fall; dunno.  She is expected to
make a full recovery.  Elizabeth and Andrew flew out, made a visit and now
are with friends at the beach in Santa Cruz.  Creeps.
 
Tomorrow I will post something on the national organization thing.  But for
today, I will discuss feral ferrets in Utah and domestication (Posted in the
FML a couple of days ago)
 
Get the location, and I will personally drive there and check it out.  I
suspect, however, the exact area will be nebulous or unknown.  This smacks
of a rumor, or 4th hand disinformation.  Why would I say that?  Because I've
been to the Salt Lake area mucho times, I know the ecology fairly well, and
it's about one of the last places a domesticated ferret could live.  At
least longer than a few days.
 
The closest living relative to the ferret is probably the European polecat;
an animal that prefers a marshy and wooded habitat, with small year-round
streams and open areas.  All reports of feral ferret populations indicate
they select similar habitats for themselves, and these types of habitats are
about the only place you can find them in a feral state.  In this regard,
they are not like the black-footed ferret at all, which prefers open prairie
for the most part, which is much drier and lacks the large marshy areas.
Historically, ferrets were also released in Australia to control rabbits,
and they went extinct, even though the rabbits continue to be a nasty
problem.  I've also been to Australia; I did some archaeology outside of
Alice Springs and some surveys in the Simpson Desert, and the climate and
ecology is fair more similar to the Utah/Four Corners area than you would
expect.  I would expect any ferret living outside the home in the Salt Lake
area would die rapidly from heat exposure, dehydration, starvation and
predation, exactly like the ferrets died in Australia.
 
This story sounds like the rumors that start up from time to time in the
chat rooms, and I have offered to go and check out each and every one, only
no one really knows where they are, a friend told me, etc. etc. etc.  My
inclination is to tell these yahoos to put up or shut up.
 
As for the cats being more domesticated than ferrets because ferrets are
closer to the polecat, well that is the biggest crock of warm smelly ferret
poop I have ever heard.  Domestication is an evolutionary process, except
humans (rather than nature) are the selective force.  There is absolutely no
way on earth to tell the absolute difference between genotypes of related
species without doing lots of expensive and time consuming genetics testing,
and boys and girls, it has not been done.  We do not know the genome of the
wild cat or the house cat, nor do we know it of the polecat or the ferret.
Without knowing, you cannot say.
 
Domestication is so much like natural evolution that Darwin wrote a book on
the similarity.  One thing is crystal clear; each species evolves, or is
domesticated, at its own rate.  Changes are relative to the species, and one
species can change rapidly in a short time, while another will change only
slightly in a long time.  Therefore, time of domestication (5000 YA for cats
vs 2500 YA for ferrets) cannot define the genetic changes in the species
during the domestication process.
 
Finally, based on experience and "book larnin'," if you exclude the fairly
recent (last few hundred years) of dog and cat breeds, the basic stock is so
similar to the wild counterparts that in some cases they are almost
indistinguishable, especially with cats.  I can tell differences in the
skulls, and with a few bones in dogs, but outside of that, your are SOL.
Ferrets are no different.  BUT, skeletal differences do not equate with
physiological differences, and on that account, I would say the ferret was
at least as "domesticated" as the cat, and probably more so.  Why you ask?
 
There are two basic changes caused by domestication in carnivores.  One is
changes to make the carnivore more human-adapted, and the other is random
changes unimportant to humans (excluding perhaps recent breed development,
but lets exclude bulldogs and persians from the first category because of
their relatively recent development).  In the first category, you find
increased sociality, decreased intelligence, and behavioral changes.  In the
other, you find random mutations because of inbreeding, changes in
coloration, extra toes, etc.  People may or may not like them, but they
don't add to the animals adaptation to humans.
 
With that in mind, ask yourself what would happen if a dog, a cat, and a
ferret were tossed out of a car in a North American temperate forest with
plenty of water and potiential prey.  The cat would have the highest
probablity of survival, the dog a slightly smaller chance, and the ferret,
virtually none.  The degree of survivability could be correlated to the
changes wrought by domestication (including mustelid food imprinting;
perhaps not altered much by genetic change as much as environmental, but the
environment is an important aspect of domestication so it is still a change
that can be correlated).  With this argument (and admittedly, in this
limited forum the argument is limited) you could argue the ferret is more
highly domesticated than the cat because it cannot survive outside of human
caretakership, except in limited areas and under extreme circumstances,
while cats readily revert to the wild.
 
In the last year, I have been told ferrets were wild in a) California, b)
Washington, c) Nevada, d) Arizona, e) Oregon, f) Ohio, and now, Salt Lake
City, Utah.  Not a single instance has been show to be true, many of the
reports are clearly false rumors, and under the presure of investigation,
locations become nebulous and "someplace we cannot get in to see." Its crap,
its a lie, because if it were true, the locations would have been long
reported by the CaCa Fish and Gestapo.
 
I will go anywhere in the 48 states to investigate feral ferret populations,
so be agressive in stopping the rumor mongers.  Just remember; you don't
need to be an expert to tell a cow from an ass.  These rumor mongers and
disinformation spreaders are not cows.
 
Bob C Tied up in CaCa Land sans ferts.
[Posted in FML issue 1978]