The modern ferret was not always the playful little smelly rogue we know it as now. Many thousands of years B.C. the European polecat, a playful little not-so-smelly creature, was believed to have been the creature from which the modern ferret was domesticated. The modern domesticated ferret and the European polecat are still confused today because of their similar physical characteristics such as a coffee colored body with a cream patch over their face, reminiscent of a bandit mask. The modern ferret has few predators in their domestic world (aside from abusive owners), but thousands of years ago their polecat relatives were not so lucky. Ferrets haven't had an easy walk on the way to their comfortable raisin-filled life now, but most ferrets at the present would agree that the hardship was worth it. Most owners complain that the unpleasantly musky odor their pet ferrets exhibit is hardly worth the trouble of caring for them, but that same unpleasant musk is the reason ferrets were not preyed upon till extinction so many years ago. Polecats, who even now roam the wilds of Northern Europe, still employ this trait as a valuable defensive mechanism against would-be predators.

    As the last ice age was coming to an end, a cat-like creature who preyed primarily on a rat acclimated to the cold was forced to find new food sources in other areas as the glaciers receded and the rats died out due to the new heat. Before the glaciers seceded, the snow-cat, which could reach weights of forty pounds (males only thirty pounds), entertained a comfortable existence in the marginally cool southern area of what is now Spain, but as the glaciers melted and the rats became unable to adapt to the new warm environment, the snow-cats began to drift due to lack of a reliable food source. The southern heat was also oppressive to the thick fur coated snow-cats. Upon their arrival in Northern Europe the snow-cats encountered the much more adaptable (they were quite comfortable in their warming environment) European polecats, who turned out to be unfortunate prey for the larger, faster snow-cat. Due to the new snow-cat threat, polecat populations suffered a slow but steady decline.

    Even though the polecats made decent quarry, some were managing to survive snow-cat encounters. Through the unpredictable recombination of their genes during the reproductive sequence, some polecats gained a trait that caused their natural odor, or musk, to be far stronger than others in their species. The polecats with this trait were entirely offensive to the snow-cat's senses. The snow-cats were quickly able to detect and avoid these new gene carriers by their pungent smell, and though some did make the mistake of attempting to prey upon them, they undeniably did not fail to make the mistake again due to the entirely unpleasant taste.

    Though at first the trait was infrequent in births, over successive generations the characteristic became more recurrent. As the population proportion tilted further toward the polecats carrying the intense musk-gene (due to their higher survival rate), more survived to sexual maturity over those who didn't carry it, thereby causing the polecat population to experience a near complete influx of this gene.

    The snow-cats, once again left without a reliable food source, were forced to find new prey.

Works Cited

The European Polecat. Lode, Thierry. 26 April 1998. .

Ferret Chromosomes. Church, Bob. FERRET-L Digest. .