By Christie Keith, Special to SF Gate
SFGate
Tuesday, April 1, 2008
They're cute, affectionate, furry and playful. There are tens of thousands
of them in California, and they're allowed as pets in most countries
and every state except Hawaii.
So why are ferrets illegal in California?
It's an old story, characterized by battling sets of statistics and
interpretations of natural history. To the California Department of
Fish and Game and some environmentalists, ferrets are wild animals
with the potential to establish feral colonies and wreak havoc on native
species if they escape from captivity.
But as Jeanne Carley of Californians for Ferret Legalization has
pointed out, the ferret has been classified "as domesticated
by the United States Department of Agriculture, Smithsonian Institute,
Museum of Natural History, the Humane Society of the United States
and 150 zoos, zoological societies and other authorities."
Which isn't to say I think all the objections to overturning the ban
are irrational; they're not. Environmental protection is a huge issue
in California, and the battle over ferret legalization is no exception.
It's just that I think the fears are unlikely to become reality. And
here's why.
There are no feral colonies of ferrets in any of the other states
where ferrets are legal, including those with climates and ecologies
very similar to California's, such as Oregon and Washington. Also,
illegal ferrets have not poured into the United States from ferret-friendly
Mexico and Canada.
As even the CDFG has
conceded, there are already tens of thousands, possibly more
than a hundred thousand ferrets in California already. After all,
Pet Industry Joint Advisory Council data indicate that around one-quarter
of the money spent on ferret food and supplies in this country is
being spent in California. With the American Pet Product Manufacturers
Association indicating there are just under 2 million ferrets in
the United States, the number in this state could be as high as 500,000,
although most estimates are much lower than that.
Even if we don't know the exact number, it's not a small one. So if
there were a serious threat that escaped pets could successfully establish
themselves in the wild, wouldn't we have evidence of that by now? It's
not like they're out there and we just don't know; if your ferret goes
missing, you can't exactly put up posters or retrieve it from your
local animal control facility.
In fact, the CDFG itself acknowledges there are a fair number of ferrets
getting out already, saying
on its Web site:
"In California, many stray ferrets are found every year. From 1989
to 1998, 47 stray ferrets from communities in the general Sacramento
region of the State were transported to the Department of Fish and
Game field station for temporary holding. This represents but a small
fraction of what escapes in the State as a whole."
If that's true, then where are they? If they're likely to start these
ferret enclaves and gobble up our wildlife, wouldn't at least one have
sprung up by now, given those circumstances?
"The bottom line, from what I've been able to determine is that it's
just a very fierce environmental debate," said Dave Gaines, of the
legal and legislative committee of the American Ferret Association, "But
ferrets are thoroughly domesticated. There are no feral colonies that
are going to form in California and destroy endangered species. There's
no evidence of that ever happening in the United States."
But some opponents point out that ferrets have been able to form feral
colonies in New Zealand. In what has become in my mind the Godwin's
Law of the ferret debate, someone always brings that up as an example
of a place where escaped pet ferrets got out of hand and started preying
on New Zealand's endangered flightless birds. It happened there, ferret
opponents say; it could happen here.
But that's not exactly what happened there. Ferrets in New Zealand
were deliberately introduced into the wild; these weren't just someone's
pets who slipped out of the front door. They were established in the
hope that the little predators would help with another introduced species,
the rabbit, whose population explosion in New Zealand and neighboring
Australia is a thing of legend. Their colonies were nurtured and assisted
until they were able to survive on their own, and the ferrets were
probably crossed with their wild polecat cousins to improve their hardiness.
It backfired badly. Because penguins had evolved in the absence of
mammalian predators, they didn't have good defense strategies against
them, and because there weren't other predators around to compete with
or prey on the ferrets, they, too, got out of hand, although not as
spectacularly as the rabbits.
That same lack of native predators gave ferrets an edge in New Zealand
they can't have in California, where hawks, foxes, coyotes, and other
predators including cats and dogs, compete with and prey on small animals
like ferrets.
In fact, the CDFG document also points out that cats cause more environmental
harm than ferrets do, and the Sierra Club said in 1997 that the only
reason they were opposed to pet ferrets but not pet dogs and cats was
that "dogs and cats are already legal." What kind of backward logic
is that? If ferrets are illegal, shouldn't dogs and cats be, too? Their
waste contaminates the soil and water. Dogs bite and bark. Cats poop
in vegetable gardens and eat birds. No one can deny any of that.
The problem is, when you start down that road, there are a heck of
a lot of species that need to be banned, and the one that most deserves
it is good old homo sapiens. There's never been an animal
yet — not even rabbits in Australia — that's done more
damage to the environment than we have.
So where do you draw the line?
Apparently in California we draw it at a little, pointy-faced, whiskered
furry creature that rarely lives even a decade, doesn't make noise,
doesn't use public parks, cannot run free, doesn't poop on the sidewalk,
has a hard time surviving unaided in the wild and, compared to many
other pets, isn't that popular even where legal. (The APPMA says there
are 1.9 million ferrets in the United States; compare that to 88.3
million cats and 44.3 million dogs.)
So, why don't ferret lovers rise up, organize and try to get the law
changed? They have, and have come very close to achieving that goal
several times, most recently in 2006 when a ferret amnesty bill, SB
89, designed only to grandfather in ferrets already living in California
(and even then only if they were neutered and microchipped), passed
the California Assembly by 64-12 and the Senate 27-2.
That bill was vetoed by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, who some thought
would sign it, given that he'd co-starred with a ferret in "Kindergarten
Cop." No such luck; the governor decided giving amnesty to California's
ferrets required an environmental impact report, even though it's hard
to imagine they could ever, even in a worst case scenario, do more
damage to the ecology of the state than just one of Arnold's Hummers.
Fine, you say; you've convinced me. Ferrets probably shouldn't be
classified as dangerous wild animals, and they probably aren't a huge
environmental risk, even if they might be a minor one. But why should
I care if they're legalized or not? I don't have ferrets and I don't
want ferrets. I'm perfectly happy with my cats and dogs, or no pets
at all.
I certainly don't expect everyone reading this to run right out and
join the campaign to legalize pet ferrets in California. But consider
this: While ferrets aren't particularly efficient transmitters of rabies,
they can carry the virus and there is an approved ferret rabies vaccine.
They can also carry canine distemper — and there's a vaccine
for that, too. While it's legal for veterinarians to treat ferrets
in California, many ferret owners are afraid to seek veterinary care
for their little fugitives, which puts both people and pets at risk.
In addition, it means that ferrets can be used for emotional blackmail.
Many ferret owners have been targeted by malicious exes and vindictive
neighbors who can out them and have their pets taken away from them.
In our interview, Gaines said that opposition to ferret legalization
in California "involves a lot of weird leaps of logic or lack of logic.
But at this point, it's treated in California political circles as
part of a humorous, goofy issue, and it would take somebody with a
lot of — well 'courage' is really the only word — to introduce
this bill, somebody who could withstand being laughed at."
Of course, Gaines, California's ferret lovers and I could all be wrong.
Maybe ferrets really are, as a 1988 report commissioned by the CDFG
infamously said, "a hazard to public health, small livestock and wildlife." What's
clearly needed is for that issue to be dealt with once and for all,
in terms even the CDFG can accept. And it looks like that's about to
happen.
A group called LegalizeFerrets.org recently
announced that a donor was willing to pay the cost of the environmental
impact report the governor said he needed before he could grant amnesty
to California's ferrets or consider their legalization.
Given that Californians have been fighting to legalize pet ferrets
since 1994, many advocates in the state aren't getting their hopes
up. But Gaines says he thinks the tide is turning, even if the pace
seems glacial at times. "Ferrets have been illegal in all kinds of
places, but over the last decade or so that has slowly been changing," he
said. "The trend is absolutely towards legalization."
California, of course, usually wants to set trends, not follow them.
And as with every issue, there is more than one side. So by all means,
don't take my word for any of this. Go to the CDFG and Sierra
Club Web sites. Soak it all in. Absorb every detail of the potential
harm ferrets could do if the worst case scenario turned out to be reality.
But when you're done, ask yourself if you and your dogs, cats, cars,
computers and cell phones could meet that standard of environmental
impact. Ask if simply sitting in your house reading this article on
your computer doesn't affect the environment as much or more than every
ferret in California ever could. And ask if it's not time to, at the
very least, give amnesty to the ferrets already here, so their owners
can stop living at the mercy of vindictive exes or neighbors and openly
take advantage of veterinary care, including rabies and distemper vaccination,
for their pets.
Christie Keith is a contributing editor for Universal Press Syndicate's
Pet Connection and past director of the Pet Care Forum on America
Online. She lives in San Francisco.
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