Every pet ferret descends from the smelly European polecat
The European polecat's scientific name comes from the Latin for stench, the same root as putrid, because it marks territory with a foul liquid. Yet this unloved animal gave us a household pet. Anatomical and genetic studies agree the polecat alone is the wild ancestor of the ferret, tamed over 2,000 years ago to hunt vermin.
The polecat is a compact, dark brown member of the weasel family with a pale belly and a dark bandit mask across the face. Compared with its relatives it has a shorter body, a heavier skull and unusually strong teeth, and it is less agile. It is also surprisingly sociable for a mustelid, often sharing its home range with others of the same sex. It hunts rodents, birds, frogs and reptiles, and females bear litters of five to ten kits in early summer.
Domestication probably began around the western Mediterranean, where rabbits are native, since ferrets were used to flush rabbits out of burrows. Aristophanes mentioned ferrets in 425 BC, and the Greek geographer Strabo described them being released on the Balearic Islands to control rabbits. Ferrets are close enough to polecats that dark ones are hard to tell apart, but they have smaller brains, are slower, cope worse with cold, live happily in groups and rarely use their scent glands. Biologists describe the ferret as a polecat that never quite grew up.
Few animals have collected as many English names. Polecat itself appeared after the Norman Conquest, perhaps from the French word for chicken, a nod to raids on poultry, or from Old English for foul. Northern England said foumart, meaning foul marten, the south said fitchou, and one naturalist counted at least 20 variants in a single pair of counties. The word fitch survives for its fur, and Dutch settlers in America named the fisher after it.
Its British roots are debated. A 2002 paper noted a thin fossil record and pointed out that the Welsh name is borrowed from Middle English, like names for introduced rabbits and fallow deer, and that no writing mentions polecats before 1066. Chaucer's Pardoner's Tale is the first English reference. Long persecuted by gamekeepers, the species has been rated Least Concern since 2008.
Source: European polecat
