Bog Myrtle & Peat

The time is fast approaching when these ferrets of mine will start to pull their weight. I would say that they are eating me out of house and home, but the fact is that while they do put away tremendous quantities of meat, it is all leftover scraps and game, neither of which I would describe as being my “house” or “home”.

With a view to introducing  them to the exciting world of bolting rabbits, I took them over to a friend’s farm this afternoon. A warren was selected far out from the hedges in a silage field below sea level where the soil was very sandy. If anything went wrong, I reasoned that the loose soil would be easy to dig through. One ferret was tried, then the other, both with leads and harnesses on a limit of six feet. After half an hour of enthusiastic but ultimately pointless messing around, I headed up to the nearby farm buildings where a huge amount of rabbits were grazing on the short grass.

Still one hundred yards out, I watched a small rabbit hop into a disused 12″ diameter pressure hose from the silage pit. Knowing that the hose was blocked at its far end, I inserted a ferret. I know that they need to be big and strong before they can deal with rabbits, but they have grown so much over the past eight weeks that I fancied their chances of bolting it out again. It was not to be.

Within seconds of putting the big ferret in, there was a tremendous scuffling and thumping, followed by a short sequence of squeaks. Less than a minute later, the ferret came back with fluff under his claws and blood on his face. The rabbit was stone dead, and it took longer to remove it from the pipe than it had done for the ferret to dispatch it in the first place. On closer insection, it was fairly sick and mixy, but still strong enough to defend itself, as I had heard through the walls of the pipe.

When shown the body, the other ferret happily mauled it for ten minutes. What a ferocious pair they have become… Mixy rabbit it may have been, but I hope that this is the way of things to come!