Q: "You don't answer much of your email anymore. Are you angry?..." A: Just another angry young fert. I simply get too much to answer anymore. It not just the number of emails (sometimes a hundred a day), but also the amount of *LIFE* I have to invest in that day. Absolutely nothing comes before my kids and ferrets, followed closely by school and work. That just doesn't leave a lot of time to do much of anything, much less read and answer tons of email. I feel an obligation to give back to the ferret community some of what has been given to me, so I try to give a priority to the q-n-a thing, but even that would suffer if I didn't write them on a laptop during "down-time," like when watching TV or waiting in doctor offices. Lately, I've been working on my degree 18-20 hours a day, and in the next few weeks I will be deeply tied up with SEM photography and microanalysis work. I'll be making appointments to go to the bathroom. The bottom line is, I read and answer what I can, when I can. I believe my friends understand the problem and cut me some slack if I don't answer in a timely fashion. I do feel bad about it, but I can't apologize for having a rich and fullfilling life outside of ferrets. Q:"I have noticed lately people refurring to you as "erudite" and "the walking encylopedia" as more of an insult than anything. Does it bother you?" A: No, but refurring might. Sounds like it might hurt worse than waxing. Q:"Which is your favorite ferret?" A: The one in my pants. The old jeans on the floor, silly. I love tham all, but I guess it depends on who needs me the most that day. I have been spending a lot of time with Sam-Luc lately, who loves to sleep on my lap while I bird watch out my window. I also have been spending a lot of time with Sandy, who has started to bite hard on occasion, probably because of her deteriorating health--perhaps her cancer has influenced her hormonal levels. But in reality, I love tham all about equally. Q:"Would you comment on your favorite ferret book?" A: No. I have only commented about Bowtie's book because of the altered "chicken-photo." Other than that, even with mistakes, I feel they do more good than harm, even the older, out of date books, so I do not comment on them in public. I have thought sometime I should go through my library and rate them all, but don't currently have the time. Q:"Your comments on the Egyptian ferrets was rather sharp. Don't you think it could be a possibility, and books mentioning them are only offerring an alternative point of view?" A: Sorry, but no off-buttons to intelligence. Ok, maybe a few for computers and hard-drives, but none connected to this subject. There is a big difference between not knowing something and mentioning it as a possibility, and knowing something but still mentioning the disproven as if it could be a possibility. In this single instance, (ferrets domesticated in Egypt before cats), the evidence is absolutely overwealming that they were not, and there is not a single fragment of subtantive evidence they were. It is a myth that does damage to our reputation and credibility, and it is both untruthful and unethical to insist on it as if it were proven or even a slight possiblity. Look at it this way. One way of figuring out where domestication took place is to figure out where it DID NOT take place. In the ferret, we can eliminate the New World, Africa, the Pacific islands, most of Asia, Britain and parts of Europe simply because European polecats do not live in those areas. Kurten suggests polecats were present in Pleistocene deposits in northern Palestine, but is only a single case, plus a 10,000-20,000 year old deposit is vastly different from a 2,500 year deposit, the time frame of ferret domestication. They weren't there *THEN* and that's what is important. That basically leaves the area between the Eurasian steppes to Spain, and northern Europe to the north Mediterranean. Because of a nearly complete lack of archaeological evidence, we must rely on the assumption that animals are domesticated where they exist as natural wild animals, such as the turkey in sw USA, goat and sheep in the Holy Lands, cattle in Europe, llamas in S. American, and so forth. Since we basically know the distribution of the European polecat before current population declines, this limits the location of domestication to that of Europe. I feel--sans archaeological evidence--there are two very good possiblities as to location of domestication; either in Spain or in eastern Europe. I think Strabo's Libyan reference is an important clue to the involvement of the Phoenicans in the trade and dissimination of the ferret, but the domestication was elsewhere. Now, the difference between my kind of conjecture--that ferrets were domesticated in Europe and traded down into the Mediterranean--is that *MY* conjecture hasn't been disproven. Occam's Razor, or the law of parsimony, states the simplest explanation is generally the correct one. To believe the ferret was domesticated in Egypt requires one to ignore vast numbers of animal mummies, recovered animal bones, heiroglyphs and historical accounts which do not support the idea. So while I can't tell you *WHERE* the ferret was domesticated, I *CAN* tell you where it was not. It was not domesticated in Egypt before the cat. Get over it. Bob C and 20 Mo' Erudite Carpetsharks [Posted in FML issue 2551]