Well I finaly realized that some people just can't understand
that ferrets are domestic.  I talked to a couple last night and said
I have two ferrets.  One replied "I like ferrets, when I was in England
a friend of mine raised them.  He would take them out to local farms
to kill rabbits."  I told him they were polecats, a distant relative of
the domestic ferret.  Well he came back and said my ferrets were tame.
I quickly replied no they are domestic, not domesticated, not tame but
domestic.  He just couldn't or didn't want to believe me.  Even his
wife couldn't understand this simple explanation.  I lost the battle
but not the war.
 
    Just looked up domestic in the dictionary, it says "Tame or
domesticated"  So in a small unknowing way he was right.  I always
thought that domestic and domesticate(ed) were two totaly unique
words.
 
 
    Have a good week and a better weekend.
 
    Brad, Sebatian and Mako.
 
[Well, um, er, you were somewhat wrong.  European polecats are not
distant relatives.  Domestic ferrets (Mustela Putorious Furo), in the
opinion of most experts, are the direct descendants of European
polecats (Mustela Putorious).  The differences are extremely minor
and can be explained adequately by a few dozen or more generations
of isolation and selective breeding/inbreeding.  They interbreed
with polecats - which indicates that they're the same species, or
damn close.  In England, they use *both* ferrets and "fitch ferrets"
(the local name for polecats) for hunting.  And polecats still
occur in the wild in England and other parts of Europe.
 
This is not to say that ferrets aren't "domestic" animals.  Which
basically means that they have a long history of captive breeding
where certain characteristics have been chosen over others, resulting
in an animal somewhat different from the wild forebears (eg: cats
versus proto-abyssinians ("Egyptian desert cat"?), dogs versus
various wolf species, cattle etc....).  Domesticated can have one
of two meanings - an individual wild animal that has been tamed,
or the result of a long process of domestication of a species....]
 
[Posted in FML issue 0450]