If you’re an Aussie ferret owner, be warned that you won’t be able to bring your ferret into Tasmania unless you have a permit.

I believe you can get one by contacting the equivalent of the Parks & Wildlife Service in your State. I’ve heard it doesn’t cost anything to get the permit and once you’ve filled out the paper work, the permit is issued pretty quickly.

I wonder why they’ve started to get tough on bringing ferrets into Tasmania. I know that you have to show any ferret brought into Western Australia to AQIS so that they can confirm it’s not a weasel.
A weasel? We don’t have weasels anywhere in Oz! Still, once the AQIS officer is happy you have a ferret, then you are free to take your baby home.

So much red tape and it probably won’t get easier as the years go on! * SIGH *

I got a scare at the beginning of the month when I saw a report in a paper from our Wheatbelt talking about a guy in Nungarin who has 9 ferrets.

wayne

Photo copyright Merredin-Wheatbelt Mercury

That was a great story but it said that DAF (Department of Agriculture and Food here in Western Australia) had placed ferrets on WA’s Declared Animals List due to “their potential to become a pest if released into the wild”.

I couldn’t believe what I was reading! It’s not like we have a climate like England or northern Europe in this are – we have an arid, dry, hot climate and any ferret which escapes here and doesn’t get found would be doomed to die. How could anyone make such a statement!

I contacted Dianne, who’s the president of WAFFS, and she confirmed they were aware of this and everyone who is well known in the ferret world here has raised their voices against this ridiculous classification. Hopefully the idiot who started this without sufficient research will get a rap on the knuckles for an waste of bureaucratic time in preparing this report.

However it does pain me to see ferrets getting a bad rap and I hope that these two incidences are not the thin edge of the wedge.

Other articles you might like;

Tagged with:

Filed under: Ferrets as Pets

Like this post? Subscribe to my RSS feed and get loads more!