Melissa Litwicki <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>Polecats: When in London, I looked up some British mammal info and found out
>that the European polecat looks just like our plain ol sable ferts.  The
>steppe polecat kinda does too, while the spotted polecat is really like the
>leopard of the black-footed-ferret world.
 
To me, the Steppe Polecat looks in some ways more like a ferret then the
European Polecat, but usually ferrets are much too light to be taken for
either of them.
 
>I keep suspecting that they just used ferrets for the stuffed polecats and
>polecat pictures I saw, since if presented with a late-neuter male and a
>polecat I wouldn't be able to tell the difference between the two....
 
If you see them at the same time you usually shouldn't have any trouble
telling them apart, as apart form the darker colour polecats are much
smaller than ferrets -- 0.45 - 0.80 kg for females, 0.50 - 1.50 kg for
males.
--
 Urban Fredriksson  [log in to unmask]
 http://www.alfaskop.net/%7Egriffon/ferrets/
[Posted in FML issue 1947]