The cat came with some paperwork, including a rabies vaccination certificate. A good thing to have. Looking a little more closely, I noticed that it includes a box for species, which includes Dog, Cat, Ferret and Other. There are enough pet ferrets for them to have their own box?
Apparently so, at least according to the organization that created the form, the National Association of State Public Health Veterinarians (NASPHV), which “helps direct and develop uniform public health procedures involving zoonotic disease in the United States and its territories,” according to its web site.
That made me wonder whether there was an easy way to find a solid estimate of the number of pet ferrets nationwide. Soon that led me to the American Veterinary Medical Association’s page on U.S. pet ownership statistics, which is a short summary of a larger report, the 2024 AVMA Pet Ownership and Demographic Sourcebook. I stuck with the summary, since the report costs actual money I didn’t want to spend on an Internet whim.
Dogs and cats are the prime pets, naturally, with 59.8 million U.S. households owning a dog and 42.2 million owning a cat (45.5 percent and 32.1 percent of total households, respectively). Average annual spending on vet care per household is $580 for dogs and $433 for cats. Interesting.
Under other animals kept as pets, the summary notes that 3.9 million households keep fish, 2.3 million keep reptiles, 2.1 million keep birds and 1.3 million keep small mammals (gerbils, hamsters, etc.), but not counting rabbits, which get their own count: 900,000 households. Ferrets aren’t a separate category, so I assume they are part of that “etc.” The full report might have the numbers, but again, I’m not buying.
A paper dating from 1998 published by the State of California Resources Agency Department of Fish and Game cites an earlier AVMA survey (1996) that found that Americans kept 791,000 ferrets that year, up from 275,000 in 1991, so it looks like the animals were on an upswing in the 1990s in terms of getting free room and board from humans in our part of the world. Other sources say the trend started in the 1980s, which sounds plausible.
A fellow I knew who was still a student at VU the year after I had graduated (1984) kept a ferret in his room, probably against university rules, but anyway he was the first person I ever knew who had one. A few years earlier, a girl I knew in high school snuck a baby Vietnamese pot-bellied pig to school in a box for her friends to see. That was surely was against the rules too, but also another story – and not a very interesting one, since she wasn’t caught and no sitcom-style high jinks were involved.
The Wiki page on ferrets cites the 1996 number, and includes all sorts of other information on the animals, some sourced, some not. Such as:
The name “ferret” is derived from the Latin furittus, meaning “little thief,” a likely reference to the common ferret penchant for secreting away small items.
A male ferret is called a hob; a female ferret is a jill. A spayed female is a sprite, a neutered male is a gib, and a vasectomised male is known as a hoblet… A group of ferrets is known as a “business” or historically as a “busyness.”
As with skunks, ferrets can release their anal gland secretions when startled or scared, but the smell is much less potent and dissipates rapidly. [Essentially a ferret fart, then]
According to phylogenetic studies, the ferret was domesticated from the European polecat (Mustela putorius), and likely descends from a North African lineage of the species… With their long, lean build and inquisitive nature, ferrets are very well equipped for getting down holes and chasing rodents, rabbits and moles out of their burrows.
One more: Ferret-legging. I’m not sure how seriously to take this.
Ferret-legging was an endurance test or stunt in which ferrets were trapped in trousers worn by a participant… it seems to have been popular among coal miners in Yorkshire, England.
That’s it for my not-at-all-comprehensive amount of ferret research, though. I’m content to assume that there are a few million out there, enough to get the attention of the folks at NASPHV. Other questions remain. Will ferret vaccination become a hot-button subject through some weird set of circumstances in our hyperconnected world? Does the (probable) incoming HHS Secretary have an opinion about ferrets? We shall see.