Another topic we’ve touched on in various places before but never actually sat down to discuss: ferret size and build. This topic comes up surprisingly a lot, not just with novice owners but also owners who have only ever had experience with one “type” or line of ferrets. I really expect this to crop up a lot next autumn though because we have several litters with very mixed sizes in their lines, which can result in some very mixed sizes. Lets start off by saying the point of this is just to show that ferrets builds and sizes are all individual. Just as you get tall people and short people, thin people and heavier built people, you also get ferrets ranging, and there’s no normal except what to expect from certain lines and breeds. The first thing to know is boys are generally bigger than girls, but that’s not a guarantee. The Dutchess, a rescue who we had for the later part of her life, was a humongous jill. She was bigger than some of my hobs at the time and absolutely dwarfed my other girls. You also get it going the other way. Seth, Loki and Corbin were all smaller and could easily blend in with the girls group. Both sexes have extremes in both directions though. Boys can be up to 3kg, and I have known healthy girls under 600g. A lot of this comes down to size but there is also build. As a general rule 2 “types” are described (though to be honest I haven't heard them being used for a while, they do still help a lot when it comes to discussing the differences seen throughout the ferret population as a whole), these aren’t mutually exclusive, more the ultimate conclusion of breeding for these characteristics again and again. These are the “greyhound type” and the “bulldog type” and are pretty self-explanatory. The greyhound types are leaner built, leggier looking and have more pointed heads. The bulldog on the other hand is stockier, with a blunter head. Most ferrets are more on a spectrum from one extreme to the other, though breeding extremes without care to other issues leads to health issues. I find bulldog type to be more prone to undershot jaws for example, however I like many, prefer a slightly blunter head. I have also seen greyhound types who are so narrow in a summer weight they simply look ill, I cannot imagine it being good for their organs. These days I have seen very few ferrets who could even loosely be described as “greyhound type”, but it is important to touch on these extremes and acknowledge that there are ferrets built incredibly narrow. Interestingly micros tend more towards the bulldog type than you might expect. I think this may be more to do with the blunter heads looking more kit-ish and cute, but there may be a much more practical reason. Perhaps this aesthetic reason however accounts for the move away from greyhound types as a whole. Build and size can be very dependant on breed and lines. Each breed of ferret being bred more so for a specific purpose has resulted in general rules you can say about each breed, the same way you would say boys are bigger than girls. Like with the sexes though there are always rule breakers and we’ll touch on some examples of this as we go ahead. As these breeds and lines mix there is also more variety to be expected. We’ll start with the standard ferret. In the UK for most of our history ferrets have been working animals first and foremost. So, the priority was to fit down a rabbit hole and scare out the rabbits. They generally scared out the rabbits just by being in there and maybe nipping the rabbits, but some people have expressed to me that they want big boys for the job so that if the rabbit has holed up, they have the strength to really bully the rabbit into running. On the other hand, some people don’t want the ferret to really have any chance of killing and eating the rabbits, and therefore aim even smaller, small enough that the ferret can be dragged out of the warren by latching onto the rabbit as it bolts. You can already see the basis of the modern-day breeds huh? Seriously, you can start an argument in the right circles by asking what makes the best working ferret. People will even argue about whether jills or hobs are preferred and to me it all seems to come down to culture ie. if the hunter likes to go for speed or muscle, and the general type of the ferrets seen in that area. My own standards have always tended smaller. I’ll add larger hobs and jills in here or there but for some reason my keepers still tend small. Look at Sunny and Ruperts litter. Sunnys mum is small, her dad huge, shes average sized for a girl and Rupert is French (we’ll get to that but he’s slightly bigger than your average standard and heavier set) we kept 2 girls from the litter and both are closer in size to their grandmother. Oddly their sister who went to a friend is the same size as her mum. Dumb luck but still my lines stay smaller. Contrast this to (most of) my ferrets unrelated to my original standard line and they are always huge in comparison. A standard was always to fit down a hole until recently though so you do see more lighter builds generally than some of the other breeds. That isn’t to say heavier set standards don’t exist, but it tends to come hand in hand with the smaller lines. Arthur, Hunter and Spring are all quite heavy set. Paige, Mim and Merlin however are all also small and not heavy built. If I had to make an educated guess the heavy builds in that line most likely came from a jill called “petite bella”, Arthurs mum, who was slightly bigger than average, so there is probably some big bulky standard ferrets out there I’ve just never met yet. Standard lines being the most diverse in terms of genetic diversity as well as build and size tend to have the most variety. Moving on from standards lets talk about micros. Micros should not be dwarfs but bred down size wise. From our standards development to modern day we know some people just preferred to work excessively small ferrets. Eventually this developed its own language as people looked for fresh blood for their lines and interest in them grew. Within recent years these ferrets have become popular with all sorts of people for all different reasons, but I think it’s fair to say that them being adorable has made them increasingly popular as pets. With their normal length coats and tiny bodies, they look extra fluffy, and forever young. It comes at a cost however as micros are one of the hardest breeds to breed. They can be very fragile; they simply cannot cope with illness as well as they are smaller and don’t have as much fat reserves. There can be issues breeding, lactating and retained kits after birth are extremely common. Litters also tend to be very small compared to other breeds. There’s not much margin for error. Most people who are trying to work with micro lines outcross to small standards, then cross back in meaning you do get a lot of range in micro lines from small standard size to, well, hamster size. Since jills need to be big enough to birth most breeders avoid breeding the smallest jills, preferring a tiny hob and a small jill. This may also be why the heavier set type is more common. Birthing hips as they say. This can also result in smaller standard ferret lines as kits with micro blood that are either too big or not required in the micro breeding program are bred into standard lines.
Lets, talk about angoras next. Angoras were originally bred for the fur trade, so bigger animals were the preference, but there’s more. It’s only really in the last 20 years or so that UK ferrets have become really moved into the mainstream in terms of being pets. Before then the vast majority of owners worked them. Abroad however the “fancy” has been going for much longer. Breeders mainly focused on exhibiting and pets, or fur farms. Since they no longer needed to fit down a rabbit hole to earn a living the ferrets got bigger, and chunkier. It was these lines that were used to develop the angora breed and you can tell. They tend to be bigger than standards, and their ribs are very well sprung. That isn’t to say that there are or were no working lines in other countries, just that they weren’t used to develop angoras as much. Hector is closely descended from a French working line, and his build reflects this being much narrower than a typical continental ferret, more in line with the build of a standard, though he is a nice big boy none the less. Interestingly I learned about a decade ago that a lot of breeders were finding if they didn’t outcross to standards regularly (if they kept increasing the angora percentage to get angora kits) then they found their massive ferrets suddenly started to shrink! One of the first boys in the country was a small boy, but his offspring were typical big angoras after the lines arrived in the UK and were outcrossed. This is a consequence of inbreeding depression and is much less common these days. Of course, these days there’s a lot more breeders working by outcrossing lines regularly. Angoras are often bred to standards and EU lines these days to improve genetic diversity, and improve the lines, so although they still tend big there is more variety these days than there once was.
Finally there is EUs. The European polecat is a wild animal. It doesn’t just flush prey it needs to bring it down, eat as much as it can and drag it off somewhere so it can finish it when it’s next hungry. They also do not hibernate so they have to be able to store the bulk to both keep them warm and provide energy if they cannot get a successful hunt for a few days. These animals tend to be big and powerful. That said the hobs are still bigger than the jills and there is exceptions. Our EU boy Loki had a massive father, very typical, but his mother was small and lithe. Like a stoat sized weasel. He took after his mother in size
and was somewhere between them both build wise, a more masculine version of his mother if you like. Or a stoat himself if that’s easier. Our boy Seth was also from a smaller EU jill. She was mistaken for a mink when first caught, speaking for her big size and build, though I should point out she was much smaller than an actual mink. His dad a Scottish working hob, threw enough small genes though to make him a brick of muscle like his mum but about the same size as her too! These are outliers though and most EUs, and EU lines look more like our Piglet who is about the size of a good sized standard jill and built like a monster, something all her daughters have taken after, in fact Iron, the only sable in the litter, looks like she should be on a BBC documentary. In short there is so much variety in different lines and breeds, and even breeding practices that you can’t really compare them. The more mixing in the line the more variety you can expect to see in a litter too. It goes so far that you can’t even compare littermates at times because there can be such big variance. It is normal, even expected, that at least one of your ferrets will be a bit bigger, or smaller, or stockier, or slighter. This can be especially clear either during weight changes or whilst your ferrets have a growth spurt (their build is clear at rehoming age BTW so if you do feel a bit worried one is a bit longer and thinner than the other ask the breeder is that’s to be expected just to put your mind at ease). There’s no reason to be concerned about these differences. As long as they are happy and healthy, they are just individuals like us.