I found this video clip of a European polecat on YouTube. What an absolutely stunning animal!

I bred a very dark sable male years ago who was the son of our first ferret and he could easily have been mistaken for a polecat, as you can see from this photo of him. I’ve never had such a dark male since

CJ was just the most gorgeous boy and he had an equally gorgeous personality – he was my weasel wardancer extraordinaire and it broke my heart when he developed insulinoma and spent the rest of his days sleeping.

This story is about “Percy the Polecat”, who has made his home in the wall cavity of the police station in the city of Gloucester.

Take a look at the slideshow of Percy and you decide whether he’s a dark sable or is, indeed, a European polecat. Certainly the comments at the bottom of the article seem to lean towards him being an escaped ferret.  However the article has a quote from someone in the Mammal Society so do we presume they took a look at Percy and proclaimed him to be a proper polecat?

You can compare Percy to pictures of this European Polecat to see if you can spot the difference.  I must say he looks very much like a proper polecat to me.

But then – look at this photo of our boy, CJ … I’d say he could be mistaken for a proper polecat too, if he had been found wandering around the English countryside!

Hahaha – I just had this thought flash through my mind of someone picking up CJ and feeding him a proper polecat diet and CJ looking at the food as if it had been put down there by aliens.  ”Eeeeuuuwww  – what’s with all this natural stuff?  Bring on my tasty dry food, please!”

I wonder if anyone in Gloucester will sit up and go, “Ahhhhh, golly gosh!  Looks just like my polecat which went missing last year!”

Now here is where the confusion sets in … sable ferrets are called ‘polecats’ both in the UK and here in Oz by most people.  We don’t have wild polecats in Australia so one would know automatically that a found sable ferret was, in fact, someone’s lost pet.

But it must be extremely hard in England to figure out if Percy, and others like him, are indeed wild polecats or someone’s pet who went walkabout.  I guess that’s where microchipping would come in useful!