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1. Wouldn't requiring ferrets (aside from the limited number needed for breeding) to be spayed or neutered greatly reduce this risk? 2. Don't feral cats and do

1. Wouldn't requiring ferrets (aside from the limited number needed for breeding) to be spayed or neutered greatly reduce this risk? 2. Don't feral cats and dogs also pose a threat to ecosystems? Why should the threat to endangered species necessarily outweigh the significant psychological benefits of pet ownership? 3. Couldn't feral ferrets from one of the many states where they are already legal easily make their way into California anyway? 4. Since many people violate the ferret ban anyway, wouldn't legalizing and regulating the keeping of ferrets result in more responsible ferret ownership?

pvaldes 4y ago
1. Neutered animals still hunt, one single racoon released in a small Spanish Island by idiots almost wiped the entire colony of an endangered marine bird in two years. 2. One problem does not exclude the other. Ferrets live in freshwater systems. Can swim and eat amphibians, fishes and molluscs. They know how to manage toads to remove the poison glands and then eat the toad entire. Feral cats don't like frogs, and avoid entering in water unless necessary. Cats favor to live near humans and are quickly extirpated from wild areas with raptors. Ferrets instead, dive into crevices and rocks, remain hidden and are much more hard to hunt. 3. They could and they should be eliminated if you want to save the Californian fauna. In any case "I want to be allowed to violate the law in my state, because the other states don't care and is free for all there" is a false dichotomy. 4. Not. You would just increase the number of ferrets and the probability of escape. To start, entire litters would be released by the animalist crew (100% of probability if the species is legally allowed to breed). Moreover, ferrets aren't dogs, they enter in each hole of crevice that see, and need to investigate it, even for days. They will not return to you when you call them so (unlike cats and dogs), if you let your pet play in the garden alone for one minute, you will lose it. Entire females in heat are an "hormonal bomb" they either mate or die by stress if let alone. This mean that they travel a lot in search of a male.
- olalonde 4y ago
  > one single racoon released in a small Spanish Island by idiots almost wiped the entire colony of an endangered marine bird in two years That's crazy. Do you have a link to that?
  - pvaldes 4y ago
    Let me refresh my memory Checked. I stand corrected. It was a few months, not two years and the seabird was not an endangered species globally (but can be locally). It happened in the National park of Timanfaya almost twenty years ago. At the end of June-2003, a trail of depredated corpses of Scopoli's shearwaters started to appear. The area is dry and the invisible predator left no traces and almost no faeces to examine. The National Park staff suspected a ferret as main candidate. Dogs, cats or even badgers were also in the list, some camera traps were set and eventually show a racoon. Until caught at the end of the summer, the final "bodycount" was 100 shearwaters killed (plus the orphaned chicks unable to survive without the parents). This just by one single racoon in a single summer. The animal was tame, not afraid of people and was clearly a released pet. If it hadn't happened in a national park no one would have bothered to hunt it. I only found a link in Spanish, you can use google translate if you are curious about the details. https://www.abc.es/espana/canarias/abci-capturado-mapache-causado-muerte-cien-pardelas-timanfaya-200310150300-214072_noticia.html https://www.abc.es/espana/canarias/abci-capturado-mapache-ca...
    - xbar 4y ago
      Similar but different, invasive rats in Galapagos have been particularly destructive in the past 50 years. https://galapagosconservation.org.uk/invasive-black-rats-in-galapagos/ https://galapagosconservation.org.uk/invasive-black-rats-in-...
    - cmrdporcupine 4y ago
      "Wild" North American raccoons here in their native range are also completely unafraid of people. Or even dogs. At least in urban areas. They basically "know" that they can't really be messed with, because it's not typically legal to shoot them, they have nasty teeth and claws, and they're ridiculously smart.
      - alyandon 4y ago
        You aren't joking about them being unafraid of people. I was sitting out on my back deck one evening here in $RELATIVELY_BIG_CITY and had two adolescent racoons approach me and start engaging in playful behavior. One of them even ran up and snagged the slipper off my foot before I protested and it dropped it and ran away.
- jasonhansel 4y ago
  I think we may be in agreement about the potential risks of ferret legalization, even if we disagree about the likelihood of the worst case scenario. But regardless, you need to weigh those risks against the enjoyment and psychological benefit that owners derive from pet ferrets, just like with pets of any other species.
  - rexpop 4y ago
    > you need to weigh those risks against the enjoyment and psychological benefit The risks are massive, and the opportunity cost miniscule.
  - sanedigital 4y ago
    > But regardless, you need to weigh those risks against the enjoyment and psychological benefit that owners derive from pet ferrets, just like with pets of any other species. This almost sounds like satire. You can't have a ferret. Dad said so. Go play with something else.
    - mikeyouse 4y ago
      Right. It's such a tiring method of argument -- "You can't do anything until you exhaustively quantify the plusses and minuses." Some things are self-evidently bad ideas with potential costs so large and "benefits" so imperceptible that they can be safely ignored out of hand. Sorry man, you don't get to have ferrets. You also can't own a cheetah or a chimpanzee. Get a hamster, cat, dog, tarantula, python, goat, chicken, alpaca, chinchilla, fish, parakeet or one of the dozens of other options.
      - Dylan16807 4y ago
        > It's such a tiring method of argument -- "You can't do anything until you exhaustively quantify the plusses and minuses." It takes like ten seconds to go over the benefits of ferrets. Why be lazy? I don't think it's a bad idea to briefly weigh both sides in just about every situation.
- scythe 4y ago
  >one single racoon released in a small Spanish Island Island fauna are uniquely ignorant of threats. On some islands, birds will literally walk right up to humans — a huge, mean apex predator. The situation in California is not reasonably comparable.
- pxc 4y ago
  > They will not return to you when you call them so (unlike cats and dogs), Ferrets can be recall trained using literally the exact same methods as one uses for cats and dogs. They learn the same way. > if you let your pet play in the garden alone for one minute, you will lose it. Yeah, this kind of thing likely surprises a lot of new ferret owners. People I've seen who are serious about caring for their ferrets never leave them unsupervised outdoors, ever. Leashes, backpacks, and fully enclosed structures (like 'catios') are popular tools. Even supervised outdoor play requires a lot of preparation and vigilance.
guerrilla 4y ago
> Don't feral cats and dogs also pose a threat to ecosystems? Yes, but that doesn't mean we should make it worse. > Why should the threat to endangered species necessarily outweigh the significant psychological benefits of pet ownership? Because ecosystem collapse could kill us or at the very least be very expensive in the long run. We're not gods, so we depend on the ecosystem working. > Couldn't feral ferrets from one of the many states where they are already legal easily make their way into California anyway? Maybe, but that doesn't mean we should make it worse.
ip26 4y ago
Don't feral cats and dogs also pose a threat to ecosystems? Yes. Cats in particular are a disaster. Ecologists have been trying to figure out how to effectively control feral populations and convince people to stop letting domestic cats outdoors for decades. "It's already a disaster so what's the harm in making it a whole lot worse" is not the most compelling argument.
- Dylan16807 4y ago
  Keep in mind that ferrets will displace some amount of cats.

pvaldes 4y ago

1. Neutered animals still hunt, one single racoon released in a small Spanish Island by idiots almost wiped the entire colony of an endangered marine bird in two years. 2. One problem does not exclude the other. Ferrets live in freshwater systems. Can swim and eat amphibians, fishes and molluscs. They know how to manage toads to remove the poison glands and then eat the toad entire. Feral cats don't like frogs, and avoid entering in water unless necessary. Cats favor to live near humans and are quickly extirpated from wild areas with raptors. Ferrets instead, dive into crevices and rocks, remain hidden and are much more hard to hunt. 3. They could and they should be eliminated if you want to save the Californian fauna. In any case "I want to be allowed to violate the law in my state, because the other states don't care and is free for all there" is a false dichotomy. 4. Not. You would just increase the number of ferrets and the probability of escape. To start, entire litters would be released by the animalist crew (100% of probability if the species is legally allowed to breed). Moreover, ferrets aren't dogs, they enter in each hole of crevice that see, and need to investigate it, even for days. They will not return to you when you call them so (unlike cats and dogs), if you let your pet play in the garden alone for one minute, you will lose it. Entire females in heat are an "hormonal bomb" they either mate or die by stress if let alone. This mean that they travel a lot in search of a male.

olalonde 4y ago
> one single racoon released in a small Spanish Island by idiots almost wiped the entire colony of an endangered marine bird in two years That's crazy. Do you have a link to that?
- pvaldes 4y ago
  Let me refresh my memory Checked. I stand corrected. It was a few months, not two years and the seabird was not an endangered species globally (but can be locally). It happened in the National park of Timanfaya almost twenty years ago. At the end of June-2003, a trail of depredated corpses of Scopoli's shearwaters started to appear. The area is dry and the invisible predator left no traces and almost no faeces to examine. The National Park staff suspected a ferret as main candidate. Dogs, cats or even badgers were also in the list, some camera traps were set and eventually show a racoon. Until caught at the end of the summer, the final "bodycount" was 100 shearwaters killed (plus the orphaned chicks unable to survive without the parents). This just by one single racoon in a single summer. The animal was tame, not afraid of people and was clearly a released pet. If it hadn't happened in a national park no one would have bothered to hunt it. I only found a link in Spanish, you can use google translate if you are curious about the details. https://www.abc.es/espana/canarias/abci-capturado-mapache-causado-muerte-cien-pardelas-timanfaya-200310150300-214072_noticia.html https://www.abc.es/espana/canarias/abci-capturado-mapache-ca...
  - xbar 4y ago
    Similar but different, invasive rats in Galapagos have been particularly destructive in the past 50 years. https://galapagosconservation.org.uk/invasive-black-rats-in-galapagos/ https://galapagosconservation.org.uk/invasive-black-rats-in-...
  - cmrdporcupine 4y ago
    "Wild" North American raccoons here in their native range are also completely unafraid of people. Or even dogs. At least in urban areas. They basically "know" that they can't really be messed with, because it's not typically legal to shoot them, they have nasty teeth and claws, and they're ridiculously smart.
    - alyandon 4y ago
      You aren't joking about them being unafraid of people. I was sitting out on my back deck one evening here in $RELATIVELY_BIG_CITY and had two adolescent racoons approach me and start engaging in playful behavior. One of them even ran up and snagged the slipper off my foot before I protested and it dropped it and ran away.
jasonhansel 4y ago
I think we may be in agreement about the potential risks of ferret legalization, even if we disagree about the likelihood of the worst case scenario. But regardless, you need to weigh those risks against the enjoyment and psychological benefit that owners derive from pet ferrets, just like with pets of any other species.
- rexpop 4y ago
  > you need to weigh those risks against the enjoyment and psychological benefit The risks are massive, and the opportunity cost miniscule.
- sanedigital 4y ago
  > But regardless, you need to weigh those risks against the enjoyment and psychological benefit that owners derive from pet ferrets, just like with pets of any other species. This almost sounds like satire. You can't have a ferret. Dad said so. Go play with something else.
  - mikeyouse 4y ago
    Right. It's such a tiring method of argument -- "You can't do anything until you exhaustively quantify the plusses and minuses." Some things are self-evidently bad ideas with potential costs so large and "benefits" so imperceptible that they can be safely ignored out of hand. Sorry man, you don't get to have ferrets. You also can't own a cheetah or a chimpanzee. Get a hamster, cat, dog, tarantula, python, goat, chicken, alpaca, chinchilla, fish, parakeet or one of the dozens of other options.
    - Dylan16807 4y ago
      > It's such a tiring method of argument -- "You can't do anything until you exhaustively quantify the plusses and minuses." It takes like ten seconds to go over the benefits of ferrets. Why be lazy? I don't think it's a bad idea to briefly weigh both sides in just about every situation.
scythe 4y ago
>one single racoon released in a small Spanish Island Island fauna are uniquely ignorant of threats. On some islands, birds will literally walk right up to humans — a huge, mean apex predator. The situation in California is not reasonably comparable.
pxc 4y ago
> They will not return to you when you call them so (unlike cats and dogs), Ferrets can be recall trained using literally the exact same methods as one uses for cats and dogs. They learn the same way. > if you let your pet play in the garden alone for one minute, you will lose it. Yeah, this kind of thing likely surprises a lot of new ferret owners. People I've seen who are serious about caring for their ferrets never leave them unsupervised outdoors, ever. Leashes, backpacks, and fully enclosed structures (like 'catios') are popular tools. Even supervised outdoor play requires a lot of preparation and vigilance.

guerrilla 4y ago

> Don't feral cats and dogs also pose a threat to ecosystems? Yes, but that doesn't mean we should make it worse. > Why should the threat to endangered species necessarily outweigh the significant psychological benefits of pet ownership? Because ecosystem collapse could kill us or at the very least be very expensive in the long run. We're not gods, so we depend on the ecosystem working. > Couldn't feral ferrets from one of the many states where they are already legal easily make their way into California anyway? Maybe, but that doesn't mean we should make it worse.

ip26 4y ago

Don't feral cats and dogs also pose a threat to ecosystems? Yes. Cats in particular are a disaster. Ecologists have been trying to figure out how to effectively control feral populations and convince people to stop letting domestic cats outdoors for decades. "It's already a disaster so what's the harm in making it a whole lot worse" is not the most compelling argument.

Dylan16807 4y ago
Keep in mind that ferrets will displace some amount of cats.