Shooting Times & Country Magazine
MAKING GOOD USE OF INSIDE INFORMATION
In this column, Simon outlines the essentials of good ferreting
Spending so much of my time in the countryside with rabbits, I get an instinctive feeling. This is based upon what I was always led to believe when I was younger: that if you get into the mind of the animal you are managing, you will be far more successful than if you don’t understand how it lives, moves and acts, especially under pressure. Looking back over the decades of rabbiting, I should have inwardly digested those sage words a lot sooner as it would have made my life a lot less stressful.
Since I have moved to North Yorkshire, one particular rabbit on the farm has illustrated this in a more obvious fashion than his counterparts ever could. At the bottom of the water meadow is a solitary black rabbit. There are quite a few locally, signs of a tight gene pool — in other words, inbreeding — as opposed to the old wives’ tale of tame rabbits being released.
Every morning when I walk the dogs, I can see him from a distance as he stands out like a sore thumb. At first, I just cast the odd glance, but as the days grew into weeks, I was finding myself mentally noting his territory and the times that he spent out feeding. His interaction with the other rabbits is also interesting. He is a bit of a loner. His warren is a smallish one under a hawthorn hedge. Large tracts of his time spent feeding are often interrupted as he accustoms himself to the locals, both does and bucks. One dominating his territory, the other possibly lining up the next generation.
I am sure plenty of country folk have also stopped over the years to gaze at and admire the tenacity of our wild rabbits. This inside information builds up into an instinctive reaction that in turn helps me when I am not only managing their numbers but attempting to capture them on camera, whether stills or film.
what can you do? You can help your jill by keeping her cage spotless to ensure that her swollen vulva isn’t getting dirty, thus inviting infection. From a ferret welfare point of view, this is better than having countless litters just because that is what has always happened.
Fuelling the debate
Science, and the huge amount of information — both good and bad — we have at our fingertips, has fuelled this debate for years. There have been conversations, debates and even arguments to try to substantiate this ferreting fable.
It is a fact, backed up by science, that if a jill is not mated immediately she breaks down and comes into season, her levels of oestrogen — the female sex hormone — will build up and cause a progressive depression of the bone marrow within her body. This can result in a condition known as pancytopenia, the abnormal depression of all three blood cell types. This condition can potentially be fatal to the jill.
In layman’s terms, this means that if you leave your jill in season for a greater length of time, the jill will not be as healthy as she should be and could potentially not fulfil her full life expectancy. The two words that fuel the controversy even further are ‘could’ and ‘potentially’. I am going to introduce a third word into this cocktail: probability. Add the pressure of those words fulfilling their meaning and you could be in trouble and your ferret’s health could be put at risk unduly.
Taking it seriously
I know to the unaccustomed that a ferret is a ferret, but a lot of people take breeding their ferrets as seriously as others do their dogs. They research the lines, colours, conformation and drive to see which hobs will bring that something extra to their line. To me, that is what breeding is all about: improving on what you already have.
If I am not breeding, then my hoblet earns his crust by removing all of my jills from their season.
This ensures that they will be in fine fettle come the summer months in readiness for when they are called upon to work.
“If you leave your jill in season for a greater length of time, the jill will not be as healthy as she should be”