Retrieverman's Weblog

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I wish they would make ferreting legal here.

Ferrets were always kept to keep rats out of granaries.

My grandpa used to ferret cottontail rabbits that would take refuge in groundhog dens and pipes when pursued by dogs or when the weather was very cold. (Cottontails do not dig their own dens, and they do not kindle their young underground. In this aspect, they differ very much from European rabbits, which they so deceivingly resemble.)

In the old days, rabbit meat could be sold, and many a schoolboy made some spending money running a ferret after rabbits.

Ferreting is  currently illegal in my state, although one can use terriers to work groundhog and fox dens. This makes very little sense to me.

I suppose that the prejudice that has always existed towards ferrets has been transposed onto their practical use.

The fact that most people who used them were small farmers and rural school boys may have also had something to do with it.

It’s very easy to demonize these people, even in a state in which the majority technically fits this demographic.

The fact that it was customary to remove the canine teeth from the ferrets may have also had something to do with it. The ferrets were notorious for going to ground and then killing a rabbit. They would then remain underground to eat their kill.

That is actually not very useful to someone who wants to kill more than a few rabbits, so they would either smoke out the ferret, which brings about a fire risk, or they would dig him out. Of course, after digging out the ferret, they destroyed the groundhog den, which would not be repaired all winter, and the rabbits would not hole up there during inclement weather.

So the solution was to de-fang the ferret to prevent him from making a kill.

He would go to ground and then flush the rabbits out, which can be caught by hand and easily dispatched. According to my grandpa, the rabbits were very unlikely to bite, although one did nail him in a very precarious spot (the upper part of the inside of his thigh.)

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Of course, the winters now are nothing like they once were, and the rabbits are very unlikely to use groundhog dens as a shelter. After all, cottontails live very much like hares, and they have very little use for going into burrows.

Beagles are a better weapon of choice against them than ferrets. These rabbits tend to run in circles, usually from one thicket or brush pile to another. If beagles are on their trail, they can bolt them from hiding until they eventually run in front of the gun.

Of course, the local lines of beagle have had something very sad happen to them. A few years ago, deer hunters in the other Virginia were in need of some good “deer dogs.” In that other Virginia, it is legal and socially acceptable to run deer with hounds. In this Virginia, it is not only illegal, it is a major taboo. (The reason for such a difference goes back to the old Cohee/Tuckahoe division that always existed in Virginia. Hunting deer with dogs is a Tuckahoe custom, while Cohees living in the mountains frowned upon such behavior.)

Now, most beagles will run deer unless trained to leave them alone.

However, training takes work.

And if someone is coming up here and offering a decent sum of money for an untrained beagle that runs deer, you will gladly sell such an animal. You’re getting rid of a useless dog.

Many of the dogs in the local lines of beagle were sold to Virginia deer chasers, and as a result, finding working beagles of any quality is now much more difficult.