PART TWO PART TWO 7. "Ferrets are too stupid to find their way home." Most ferrets that escape are never found, so on the surface this appears true. However, ferrets are same sex exclusionists and have a very strong instinct to disperse. What humans see as 'being lost', ferrets see as dispersal. They are simply following their instincts to find a home away from other ferrets of the same sex. Also, there is a bit of "uncontrollable curiosity" in play as well. Between the two, an escaped ferret is hard to find, regardless of intelligence. 8. "Ferret are vicious biters." Compared to a pissed German Shepherd? Ferrets are pretty small, so they have tiny, sharp teeth; it takes little force for them to break skin and draw blood. There may be no intent for harm, but tiny, sharp teeth on soft skin can result in a crimson boo-boo. Statistically, ferrets are among the safest pets a human can own. 9. "Ferrets are prone to cancers." ALL older mammals dogs, cats, humans, rabbits, pigs, rats, whatever, are prone to cancers. Many cancers are triggered by injury to DNA, which is cumulative over time. The older you get, the more chance of cancer you have. Ferrets do seem to have a predisposition towards adrenal tumors and lymphoma, but most show up after the ferret is biologically old (4 to 5 years). The chance of a young ferret developing a cancer is about equal to that experienced by other species. If you checked out the listings in veterinarian libraries regarding genetic disease in domesticated animals, you would discover ferrets actually have a very low rate of genetic disease. You should read what can go wrong with dogs or cats. Poor creatures. 10. "Ferrets stink." Ferrets have body odor, just as do dogs, cats, people, birds and any other living being. Ferrets just smell different than what is accustomed by some people who are used to stinky old dogs, so the odor is sometimes considered an unpleasant one. I personally find it favorable to "wet dog smell" or, "tom cat spray." A healthy, neutered ferret, on a balanced diet, has little objectionable odor, and probably stinks less than your uncle's armpits. 11. "Ferrets aren't as smart as dogs or cats." There are at least a half-dozen recent books on animal intelligence, and not one would agree with that statement. The scientists cannot even agree WHAT is instinct and WHAT is intelligence, and without those basic definitions, any comparisons would be invalid. What has been found is that if you consider problem solving as intelligence (many animal behaviorists do), then ferrets rank above cats or dogs, into the range of small primates. However, if you consider memory to be intelligence (few behaviorists do), then ferrets rank lower than dogs but above cats. The biggest hurdle to get over is the one of mode of communication. A dog has almost human visual and auditory modes of communication, so some humans anthropomorphize the ability to use sound to communicate as a sign of intelligence. Ferrets evolved as same-sex exclusionists, and have little need for advanced auditory communications skills. Instead, they use body language, a few vocalizations and LOTS of olfactory (smell) clues. Ferrets aren't dumber; they simply do things differently, and it doesn't take a lot of brains to figure that one out. 12. "Breeding ferrets to polecats strengthens the breed by eliminating poor genes." This sounds like population genetics taught by creation scientists. Ferrets, like pre-1800 cats (when fancy variety breeding programs began to create new "breeds"), look very much like their polecat progenitors BECAUSE the people doing the domestication wanted animals that did exactly the same thing polecats did, but were more user friendly. So, rather than selecting for body, color or size differences, they selected for BEHAVIOR. What this means is most physical characteristics of ferrets are shared by polecats, and interbreeding will do little to change those allele frequencies because they are already so close to each other. What is will and does change is behavior. Dozens of papers document ferret-polecat hybrids are more stressed, have more fearfulness, are more temperamental and have are more likely to bite than non-hybridized ferrets. You are simply breeding a more dangerous ferret. Put simply, if the idea of crossing a ferret to a polecat is to dilute the bad genes, it may partially work with an individual litter, but at population genetics levels, it will have little or no impact because those "good genes" ALREADY exist in the population. Gene frequencies are hard to shift once stabilized, and introducing "new genes' which already exist in the population has no real effect. But what it does do is to shift the frequency of those genes which code for behavior, making the offspring less docile or human friendly. It is safer and better for the animals to simply remove ferrets with bad genes from the breeding population than it is to hybridize them with wild animals. Don't lose a mile to gain an inch. Bob C and 15 Mo' Poledawg Progenitors [Posted in FML issue 3250]