How far can a lost ferret go?

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How far can a lost ferret go?

By Edward Cook

Tuesday, 04 November 2008

What’s the furthest you’ve ever known a ferret to stray after being lost in a burrow?

Ferrets
EDWARD COOK says:
Ferrets can travel a fair distance when lost, some get found by the owner others get picked up by someone else and some just seem to vanish into thin air.

Over the years, I’m sad to say, I’ve lost a few ferrets during ferreting operations but what goes around comes around – I’ve probably found as many as I’ve lost!

Some years ago I lost a polecat along an old railway bank but he was picked up some months later in a town about a mile or more away from where he went missing.

I heard through the grapevine that he’d turned semi-wild but lacked fear of humans… therefore he wasn’t entirely grateful to the chap who kindly scooped him up as he roamed along the street.

Ferrets will travel a lot further than this if food is scarce but if a series of burrows hold plenty of rabbits near to where the ferret went missing then chances are it will stay in the vicinity for a reasonable amount of time.

Most ferrets that I’ve lost, then found again, have been picked up within a few hundred yards of where they were last seen, and normally within 24 hours.

I once lost an albino hob one morning and it eventually turned up as it was getting dark. The hob, however, was plodding across from the other side of a 50-acre field and therefore must have worked a fairly long hedge before he decided to make his way back!