Please excuse me for making two posts in one day but this topic
intrigues me .
 
A few years back my wife and I went to the mid-lands of England (Tenbury
Wells ) .  We were at a Pub one night and befriended a couple of locals
and told them that we had ferrets at home as pets.  This made both of
them very curious and amused , they asked us to join them the next day
for hunting .
 
It was a typical English day , overcast and spitting rain.  we met at the
house of the gent with the ferrets .  They were kept outside year round
in hutches one end open , the other a plywood box with a 4 inch opening .
 
The gent made a clicking sound and i watched as this HUGE hob poked his
head out then slide out , he must have been 5-6lbs .  he put on heavy
leather gloves and pulled the big guy out , he had a unique odor (lets
leave it at that ) I asked if I could hold him , "Sure?" ...... I knew to
keep my hand up under his forearms to reduce the odds of feeding him
breakfast.  this guy was heavy , solid and strong .  Off to the hunt ,
the object was to eliminate a colony of hares that reside in the brambles
between two fields of lettuce and they were causing much damage.
 
We covered all the openings with a staked catch net then unleashed the
jill down the only opening with no net , there we sat with a small bat .
not much happened for about twenty minutes , the gent said , "She's
eating!!" out came the hob , he shot down the hole and then all heck
broke loose
 
we got four hares within minutes , in the end we had the colony flushed
out with a total of seven.  The hob came out but wouldn't leave to
burrow, we teased him with a hare carcass and it worked , he latched on
and we dragged him out.  The Jill we had to dig out , she had killed two
young hares and was half way through one when we found her.  When we got
back to their house the ferrets went back into their hutches , the hob
was rewarded with the carcass of a adult hare and the jill was given the
young to finish off .The gent said that they are fed mostly road kill ,
birds that are shot down , rats, mice & voles plus fish.
 
Now this is the domestication issue These ferrets come from domestic
stock but with this diet and the lack of any human contact the domestic
side is subdued and almost nonexistent thus what you have is a wild
ferret , if the hob I held had a chance to he would have made a meal of
my hand .
 
It would be interesting to see if some of the genetic traits of these
ferrets could help our ferrets and the genetic problems that have been
a possible cause of these major glandular abnormalities.  .
 
OK , I'm off the soap box
Mark (ferreter)
[Posted in FML issue 3938]