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Free The Ferrets - California's Ban On Ferrets
by Michael Lynch
California's banal ban on an innocent pet
Arizona resident Brent Utley ran head on into one of California's most
bizarre laws on a sweltering day in June 1995. Utley was heading for summer
school in California with his two pet ferrets in tow. He declared them at
the
Department of Food and Agriculture inspection station in Blythe, California,
not
realizing that his Arizona pets were contraband in California. The
inspectors
refused him entrance to the state as long as he had his furry friends.
Facing the unpalatable options of returning home to find a ferret sitter or
trying to sneak through, he made an unsuccessful repeat run for the border.
He
was arrested, and the judge imposed a $500 fine and three years of
probation.
"I told them I didn't have the money," Utley said, "so they said that I
could
go to jail for four days." Utley actually spent only one day behind bars,
earning an early release for good behavior - and press coverage that
embarrassed
the county.
Described by enthusiasts as "cats without the attitude" and "kittens that
never grow up," domestic ferrets, members of the weasel family, are furry
bundles weighing one to five pounds. Although their cousin, the rare
black-footed ferret, is native to America, the kind kept as pets originated
in
Europe. The consensus among experts everywhere but in California's
Department of
Fish and Game is that the cage-bound domestic ferret is a basically harmless
pet. Elsewhere in the continental United States, having a ferret for a pet
is no
problem. But the California DFG says ferrets are a wild menace, and it bans
ownership of them.
As ferrets have come into favor, the ban has been causing hardship for
otherwise law-abiding citizens. According to the DFG, in 1989 there were
some
500,000 ferrets in California. Ferrets Anonymous, a clandestine group of
ferret
owners, claims a membership of 2,200 Californians. The California Domestic
Ferret Association mails its newsletter to nearly 5,000 California
households.
As testimony to the pets' popularity, large California pet stores routinely
carry ferret food, ferret cages, and ferret toys, despite the ban.
Largely because of the work of Ferrets Anonymous and the California Domestic
Ferret Association, a three-year effort to overturn the DFG's ferret
prohibition
is on the verge of success. On May 16, the California Assembly passed by a
margin of 60-7 a nonbinding resolution calling on the Fish and Game
Commission
to legalize the ferret. The only thing standing in the way of legalization
is an
Environmental Impact Report the DFG claims it must conduct under the
California
Environmental Quality Act before the commission can change the regulation.
This
seemingly routine step has ferret enthusiasts on edge because the DFG
remains
resolutely opposed to ferret legalization and has relied on faulty
information
in the past.
The DFG's main professed concern is the possible threat that ferrets could
pose to endangered species if they escape and establish feral populations.
Ancillary excuses for the ban include ferrets' supposed ferocious attacks on
infants, the possibility they could carry diseases, and the critters'
supposed
threat to the state's poultry industry. But the DFG has few facts to support
its
position.
The heart of the government's case against the ferret is in a 1988 report,
"Pet European Ferrets: A Hazard to Public Health, Small Livestock and
Wildlife,"
conducted at the request of the DFG by the California Department of Health
Services. The report's tone is reminiscent of nothing so much as the cult
classic film Reefer Madness, a piece of government propaganda that so
exaggerated the threats of marijuana smoking that it single-handedly
discredited
government information on drugs for at least a generation.
Working itself into a rhetorical lather, the report claims that "ferrets
sometimes unleash frenzied, rapid-fire bite and slash attacks on infants....
The
animals have then been reported to drink the victim's blood and eat the
shredded
tissue." The report stopped short of investigating whether ferrets were
implicated in satanic cults. It did, however, spread some other falsehoods
that
have given politicians and bureaucrats justification for the ferret ban. The
report claims that "feral ferrets abound in other states" - which is
demonstrably false - and that ferrets "have contributed to the extinction of
20
species of endemic New Zealand birds," a fact that is as near and dear to
the
DFG's concerns about ferrets as it is wrong. The book the authors cite to
support this claim, Immigrant Killers, by Carolyn King, states, "There is
not a
single known extinction or diminution [of native species] in New
Zealand...due
to any of the mustelids [ferrets, weasels and stoats]."
The allegedly ferocious ferret seems a lot less scary when you compare them
to dogs, something the report fails to do. According to data from the
Journal of
Veterinary Medicine, dogs are more than 200 times more likely to inflict a
serious bite than ferrets.
It's hard to raise the ferret issue without eliciting a chuckle. But for
ferret owners seeking legitimacy - and for the DFG, which seeks to protect
the
status quo - the issue is serious business. And it is often the pettiest
bureaucratic tyrannies that do the most both to discredit the administrative
state and to undermine the proper role of government in a free society.
Just ask Ilona T. Maggard, who also ran afoul of California's unique ferret
law. On November 26, 1995, after she placed an ad in The Fresno Bee -
"Found:
Exotic Animal" - five law enforcement officers visited Maggard. They
discovered
that Maggard, in addition to having found an escaped ferret, owned two of
her
own. Although her ferrets surrendered uneventfully, the officers proceeded
to
ransack her home, opening sealed boxes, examining photo albums, and
rummaging
through her children's dressers.
Maggard was arrested and sentenced to two years of probation, during which
DFG officials can search her house with neither prior announcement nor
warrant.
The judge forced Maggard to pay the DFG an Orwellian $500 "donation" on top
of
the $800 it supposedly cost the DFG to deprive her of her pets.
Although the DFG claims not to actively focus on ferret enforcement, one of
the wardens in the Maggard case openly claimed that she had conducted an
11-month investigation for one ferret bust. If the Fish and Game Commission
reclassifies ferrets, as expected, Maggard hopes to have her ferrets back
home
by the time she has paid her debt to society.
Michael Lynch (huskiemike@aol.com) is a public policy fellow at the Pacific
Research Institute, a San Francisco-based think tank.
COPYRIGHT 1996 Reason FoundationCOPYRIGHT 2004 Gale Group
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