Why don’t we use the term “yearling” in ferrets?
I don’t have answers for this. Genuine question. Thinking about adding it to our general language.
It’s a bit weird with ferrets the way we talk about their age. They’re born in May and are kits. Then February comes around and they’re breeding age. They’re still kits but most breeders will consider them for their first litter at this age. But they’re still entered in kit at a show. Now traditionally we term them “last years kit” or just say 1 year old, which is not correct in any way. Let’s say you have a late litter in September. Your baby jills still going to come into season in February but she’s only going to be 5 months old. Yeah, she can have a litter then, but she might not be ready.
It’s also a bit awkward to compare 5 months old and 9-month-old physically. You’ll see this mostly in their build, young babies still having that puppy fat and older ones coming out of their winter weight, but there’s other things. You might still have growing with a 5-month-old, you certainly wouldn’t be looking to neuter yet but as “last year’s kit” is synonymous with 1 year old some might be considering it. You’re also smack bang in the middle of adolescence with kits in this general time frame, so they’re mentally a bit different from the youngsters in their new home and the adult ferrets they could equally be compared to. Should we consider them apart? I think it would be good to have the language to even if only to talk about things more clearly.
So, what does yearling mean? Well it’s generally used to define an animal between their first and second birthday. A year old so to speak. This isn’t technically accurate with ferrets if we’re talking about “last years kit” but it is as accurate as its synonym. Specifically, it generally denotes a foal. Titbit of random horse knowledge they are another animal whose births are rounded. All horses are registered born on the new years so this is a rather similar situation, though for a foal their age is rounded down, not up like a ferret.
In the grand scheme of things yearling basically means “lived a year”. When you speak to the community of years past the main bit of the year for ferreters was the rabbiting season, generally cut short by the breeding season. The season would start in September, and end in May if it wasn’t for the jills coming into season. This incidentally is also why we’ve previously seen a rush of ferrets for sale or abandoned in January and February. They were working ferrets who their owners didn’t want to breed and didn’t want to feed in the off months (like the setters in Spain). So, a ferret that was used in the working season, assuming he was trained beforehand and of a reasonable age, would be around breeding age in the breeding season. The rabbit season is around 8 months so let’s set the bar at half of that. To be a yearling a ferret has had to be old enough to have worked for half of the rabbit season
Let’s consider our hyperbolic jills using the yearling term as well then;
We have a litter born in May and a litter in September. The kits are raised as per normal. The May baby is around 16 weeks old at the start of the rabbiting season and is taken out to the field. By the time she has come into season she will have been able to have worked for a good 5-6 months. We’ll give her the new term of yearling to define she has lived through a workable season.
The September kit is only 16 weeks at the turn of the year and as such can only get around a month’s experience in the field before we would be expecting her to be in season. We will not consider this her having lived through a workable season then so she will be a kit.
It’s March, time to consider our pairings. We have our adult who is over a year (probably around 20 months), we have our yearling jill (around 9 months old, still a baby but old enough to have a litter), and we have our kit from last year (the little 5-6 month old baby who was just starting to get some time in the field. She’s not quite old enough to raise a litter even though she’ll be in season soon). With the new language we don’t need to get a calendar out. We know the yearling is old enough and the kit really isn’t. That seems a bit more appropriate. It makes keeping track of their relative ages better at the least.
If we continue this round to the next rabbit season in September, they’ve all passed their birthdays, even if we don’t know exactly when those birthdays were. We now have 3 adults (irrespective of if they’ve been out in the field or not), all at different ages but all clearly in the same stage of life.
What do you think: is it worth adding to our ferret language or not? Think I'll start using it
bye for now xx