Ferret Locators, Family Planning and Polecat Chow

A rabbit hole in the U.K. is netted.

In Great Britain, rabbit hunting with ferrets has never been easier as this 1998 article from The Independent makes clear.

Within the last 10 years ... three innovations - one technical, one medical, and one nutritional - have radically transformed ferret-keeping in Britain.

The technical innovation is the invention of the electronic ferret locator. This is a device about the size of a box of cooking matches, which picks up signals from a tiny transmitter attached to the ferret's collar, thus enabling the ferreter to locate and dig out a working ferret should it "lie up".

In the past, the dreaded "lie up" was the bane of the ferreter's life. A lie up is when a ferret is put down a rabbit hole, and after running up and down for a bit, and perhaps killing and partially eating a rabbit, she simply curls up and goes to sleep. Like all carnivorous predators, ferrets are big sleepers, especially after a meal.

Before the invention of the locator, the ferreter faced with a laid-up ferret had several options - all of them incredibly time- consuming. One was to put his head as far down the rabbit hole as possible and try calling his ferret out. A potentially embarrassing method this, if attempted on or near a public right of way. Another was to paunch a rabbit and try to entice the ferret to the surface with the smell of rabbit's innards. And failing these, the ferreter had to nip home and get his nastiest, most anti-social hob ferret, tie a length of string to it, and send it down the hole to give the sleeping ferret a wake-up call.

And failing that, the ferreter had to sit there all night, or until the ferret decided to come out of its own accord. It has been argued that over the years the "lie up" has contributed more to the countryman's reputation for surliness than anything else.

But these days all a ferreter with pounds 69. 50 to spend on a ferret locator has to do is wave it about until it picks up the signal, turn the dial until he gets a depth reading in feet, then dig down to the ferret, trying not to decapitate it with the spade as he gets in close. No fuss, no mess, no time wasted. The improvement in the quality of life of the average locator-owning ferreter has been immeasurable. If, for example, a ferret lies up just as the ferreter is thinking about packing up for the day (normally enough to induce apoplexy in all but the most phlegmatic of ferreters in the bad old pre-locator days), with any luck our man can locate his ferret, dig it out, fold his nets, paunch his rabbits, whittle a stick, and still be back at the caravan in time for the first reading of the football results.

One might have imagined that new-fangled electrickery such as this would be slow to catch on with country people practising a hunting technique unchanged from that depicted by early medieval tapestries. Not so. Once they were in the shops, news of the ferret locators spread through country districts like myxomatosis. And elderly ferreters who had never before set foot inside a pet shop were queuing on the step to buy one. In no time at all, the popularity of the little-understood ferret locator made it the countryman's equivalent of the mobile phone.

The second innovation to revolutionise ferret-keeping was the perfection of a surgical technique for vasectomising hobs (male ferrets). One of the many curiosities of the ferret is that unless the jill (female) is served by a hob once she has come into season, she may die. (When a jill is in season, her vulva swells up like a football, so this should be fairly obvious, even to a novice ferret-keeper.)

In effect this meant that ferret jills were constantly producing litters, which needed to be fed, and if a litter came late in the year, the mother was temporarily unavailable for work. With two litters per year at, say, seven kittens per litter and a full-time ferreter only needing three or four hard-working ferrets, the majority of kits were surplus to requirement. Of course, rather than raise these unwanted litters, the normal practice was to knock the youngsters on the head - or "make sailors out of them", to use a country euphemism - maybe leaving two to suckle the milk.

But now that British veterinary practices are able and willing to vasectomise hob ferrets for as little as pounds 20 a time, everyone concerned is a lot better off than they were. The ferret-keeper's life has been simplified because he no longer has to anxiously study his jill's vaginas or commit infanticide; the jills are satis- fied; and once the vasectomised hob gets over the shock of the operation and finds himself being lent out all over the district, he can't believe his luck.

... The third, and in many ways the most crucial, advance in ferret welfare came four years ago, when a pet food company called James Wellbeloved began marketing a dry, "complete" ferret food. Ferrets require a high- protein diet, and this has meant that, in the past, ferret-keepers had to keep their charges supplied with meat, ideally in the form of paunched rabbits. But as ferrets will eat any meat, in any condition, no matter what the live animal has died of, they were given anything from butchers' offal to frozen day-old chicks to fallen livestock to long-dead road-casualty badgers. It wasn't that long ago that if you saw a car stopped in the middle of the road and the driver out and busily scraping a dead crow off the tarmac, you could put money on it that she or he was a ferret fancier trying to save themselves a few bob.

... Feeding decomposing flesh to ferrets is OK in the winter, but in summer the flies are terrible. On the whole, therefore, what with the imperative to feed ferrets on flesh, and the attendant flies, and the smells, and the reputation of the ferret as a psycho killer, ferret-keeping was never an attractive proposition for the squeamish, the fastidious, or anybody who wanted to remain on speaking terms with their immediate neighbours.

The advent of a dry, odourless, complete ferret food has changed everything. Suddenly ferrets are coming to live indoors as housepets. A damp draughty hutch as far away from the house as possible, with a week's droppings piled up in one corner, and a paunched rabbit slung in every once in a while, is now the exception rather than the rule.

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