Yes, ferrets do devote a lot of their brain size to odor. In relation to this: >From what we know about odors being important to ferrets, it follows >that they should be able to detect and differentiate quite a few subtle >differences in odor that other species who do NOT have such large >processing areas in the brain cannot. Therefore, I would conclude that >the ferret uses a great deal of its brain to identify and interpret >odors it detects. There is a really cool neurological case which Oliver Sacks wrote. I can not recall what happened to the young man's brain -- injury, disease, whatever -- just that it was a brain problem. A young man suddenly became much more aware of odors. By much more I mean MUCH. He could tell who had been in a room something like 20 minutes before, for example. He found that the result of having so much olfactory stimulus all the time (since smell in much more like hearing than sight in that it is always there; you can't turn away like you can with your eyes) was that he could not really plan ahead -- there simply were way too many current distractions. After the enhanced ability went away he was once again able to plan ahead. The upshot was that the treating neurologists arrived at the conclusion that the human brain has the ability to smell at incredible levels but our brain design may actively block that ability. >When I did a Medline search on Friday, I got more than 3000 hits on the >search word *ferret.* To find out how to use Medline, contact me. Also really marvelous is Hubmed, a variant of Pubmed: http://www.pmbrowser.info/ which has links not only to abstracts, but in some cases to complete articles, and some neat search features for related articles or articles by the same authors, and more. It's a fine tool. Dave wrote: >The ferret camp needs to make this issue broader than ferrets, it has >to be about reforming Fish and Game, making government receptive to the >people. YES! There is a real opening here to get in stuff about how much money has been wasted by your F&G -- and it's not just in-state. I don't know how much of this is still going on but I was told years ago by F&G people in at least four New England states that the only state worse than California for sending out reams and reams of UNSOLICITED material and publications pushing that state's own F&G views was Florida. Again, I don't know if this is still so, but when you consider that there are 50 states and then the protectorates and so on this likely amounts to a LOT of money. Imagine how useful that would be in a newspaper article if it is still going on? [Posted in FML issue 4225]