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]