How Was The Ferret Domesticated? Of all the questions regarding the domestication of animals, this is perhaps one most impossible to answer without the use of a temporal displacement device and the mentorship of Jules Verne. Fortunately, we are talking about the ferret, which--like the cat--is a special case that allows us to rule out most methods of domestication, so even though the conclusion cannot be proved, it at least can be arguably probable. There are numerous ways to domesticate an animal, including one novel idea that animals can domesticate themselves. Of this last hypothesis, all I can say is the idea is extremely controversial. Over the years, one student of domestication or another has postulated that dogs, cats, and even cattle, goats, and sheep domesticated themselves by close association with humans. Like recent religious converts, the proponents of this idea offer "just so" stories as scientific fact, but really offer little evidence that conclusively supports their contention. For example, the argument Egyptian wild cats domesticated themselves fails to answer why the same subspecies of wild cats that were domesticated in ancient Egypt still exist wild in Egypt today. It also fails to explain why other animals, such as civets, genets, martens, polecats, weasels, mongooses, rats, deer mice, and scores of other species that live in close habitation with humans are not domesticated. It is a good idea, and it brings focus on some questions previously ignored, but it ultimately fails because domestication--by definition--is a human process. If animals do it themselves, it is called adaptation, and numerous animals have adapted themselves to survive in close human contact and remain undomesticated. This is not just a nit-picky distinction; if you want to understand how an animal was domesticated, you need to be able to distinguish animal adaptation from human changes, so such a distinction is of paramount concern. Cockroaches, house mice, body lice, and sewer rats live in close association with humans, but they are clearly not domesticated. Why? Because for an animal to be considered domesticated, their reproduction has to be controlled by people. Ferret reproduction is clearly controlled by people, even when humans are breeding them back to wild populations. This doesn't make the ferret less domesticated; it simply makes them less reliable. At this point in time, how the process of domestication changes the genetic information in the domesticated animal is not well understood. It changes genes that occur at low-frequency rates into genes that occur in high-frequency rates, but perhaps the interaction of those genes are more important than the actual changes. It is not the invention of new genes, but a shift in the frequencies of existing ones that drives the changes seen in domestication, which is why breeding ferrets back to polecats (called introgression) is such a dangerous practice--you simply cannot predict how the offspring will behave. Take a step back from the question a bit and consider how the genes are flowing. Domestication is a process of genetic manipulation; you breed animals to change the frequency of specific genes (the gene frequencies are changed even if you are not aware of the ones you are changing). If a domesticated ferret escapes and breeds with a polecat, introducing "domesticated" genes into the wild population, what happens? (Note: I placed the term "domesticated" inside quotes because there is really no such thing as "domestication genes" that make an animal domesticated; I am using the term for conveniences' sake only). The answer is, ultimately, nothing. Those animals with "wild genes" will survive better in the wild than those hybrids with "domesticated genes"; simple natural selection. Even if the hybrid survived and bred, they would breed to other wild polecats, so the effect of domestication will be minimized and lost after a few generations. There might be a few genes that are slightly different that did not impact the fitness of the animal, and certainly the mitochondrial DNA would be messed up making it difficult to trace ancestry, but all-in-all, no big change. So, what about the "wild" gene flow into the ferret? The same thing; no one wants a nervous ferret that bites regardless of handling, so they aren't as popular. But even if you continue to bred the line to non-hybrid ferrets, the "wild" genes are diluted in a surprisingly few number of generations, becoming "domesticated," and you are essentially back to where you started only you have lived through a few generations of nasty, biting ferrets for your trouble. And, you have seriously screwed up the ability of geneticists to use the genetic information to trace ancestry. It was common practice to occasionally breed the ferret to polecats in improve their hunting abilities. I think this habit of ferreters to bred the ferret to polecats is largely responsible for the public perception that ferrets are "nasty biters." The point here is not JUST that it is a really bad idea to breed ferrets to polecats, but that if you allow a domesticated animal to bred to wild ones, it will never become domesticated because you are not reproductively isolating the population. There will be really no shift in the animal's genes that create the effect of domestication and all you will have is a tamed animal, not a domesticated one. It is the genetic isolation of the human-controlled group from the wild one that is at the core of domestication. Why is this important? Because if you have a domesticated animal, you KNOW they were purposely bred to be that way. That means there was human intent for the ferret to be domesticated, which means people purposely isolated the breeding of a number of wild animals until the captive population was genetically different, and then they preserved those changes by maintaining that genetic isolation. In the case of ferrets, this represents mostly reproductive and behavioral changes. Some of the questions of the "how" of ferret domestication may never be answered. For example, were ferrets caged in small groups, or were they penned up in larger ones? Were there only a few people per village with ferrets with a large population in the surrounding areas, or were there a lot of ferrets in a rather limited area? Were ferrets an object of trade, with groups actively trying to obtain them, or were they spread by word of mouth and person-to-person contact? While these types of questions cannot be answered without extensive archaeological work, we can be sure of one thing: ferrets were reproductively isolated from polecats in order to produce an animal with clear traits of domestication. That means they were housed in a manner so they would not escape. While the manner of housing must have changed over the years, I would expect much of the practice to be virtually identical to those practices from the last century or so. My best guess is that ferrets were domesticated from polecats by housing the animals in small pens or cages, and only breeding those that were tamed towards humans; the practice of "breeding for tameness" would explain ALL traits of domestication currently seen in ferrets. Bob C [log in to unmask] "How to Hunt Rabbits: The rabbit likes his warren, but spends his nights roaming in the broom, the long grass and the brambles looking for his favorite herbs. If flushed out by a spaniel or greyhound, he is off in a zig-zagging run, or jumps into a burrow around which a siege is organized. Fine nets are put over the holes and a ferret is sent down the only one left free; he wears a muzzle so that he can't kill the rabbits, devour them and appear days later after sleeping it off. If there is no ferret available, then a piece of cloth rubbed with sulphur and incense is burnt and shoved into the burrow. Disturbed by the smell of the ferret or the smoke, the rabbits soon rush up into the nets where slaughter and a place in the stew await them. Gaston Phoebus 1387-1388, Illuminated Manuscript 1405-1410 "The Hunting Book". [Posted in FML issue 4777]