Other purported collective nouns, including "besyness", "fesynes", "fesnyng", and "feamyng", appear in some dictionaries, but are almost certainly ghost words. A group of ferrets is known as a "business", or historically as a "busyness". Ferrets under one year old are known as kits. A spayed female is a sprite, a neutered male is a gib, and a vasectomised male is known as a hoblet. Ī male ferret is called a hob a female ferret is a jill. Whether this was a reference to ferrets, polecats, or the similar Egyptian mongoose is uncertain. The Greek word ἴκτις íktis, Latinized as ictis occurs in a play written by Aristophanes, The Acharnians, in 425 BC. The word fyret seems to appear in Middle English in the 14th century from the Latin, with the modern spelling of "ferret" by the 16th century.
In Old English (Anglo-Saxon), the animal was called a meard or mearp. The name "ferret" is derived from the Latin furittus, meaning "little thief", a likely reference to the common ferret penchant for secreting away small items. The domestic ferret is often confused with the black-footed ferret ( Mustela nigripes), a species native to North America. The ferret has also served as a fruitful research animal, contributing to research in neuroscience and infectious disease, especially influenza. In New Zealand and some other countries, restrictions apply due to the damage done to native fauna by feral colonies of polecat–ferret hybrids. The legality of ferret ownership varies by location. In North America, the ferret has become an increasingly prominent choice of household pet, with over five million in the United States alone. Contemporary scholarship agrees that ferrets were bred for sport, hunting rabbits in a practice known as rabbiting. The species is sexually dimorphic, with males being considerably larger than females.įerrets may have been domesticated since ancient times, but there is widespread disagreement because of the sparseness of written accounts and the inconsistency of those which survive. Including their tail, the average length of a ferret is about 50 cm (20 in) they weigh between 0.7 and 2.0 kg (1.5 and 4.4 lb) and their fur can be black, brown, white, or a mixture of those colours. Physically, ferrets resemble other mustelids because of their long, slender bodies.
The ferret is most likely a domesticated form of the wild European polecat ( Mustela putorius), evidenced by their interfertility. The ferret ( Mustela furo) is a small, domesticated species belonging to the family Mustelidae.
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