Ferrets plus pants equals hours of entertainment

The only sport worth watching is curling, which is kind of a cross between shuffleboard, bowling and housekeeping. It’s a Zen-like sport, where nothing seems to be happening and then suddenly, nothing happens and things settle down to where nothing is happening. It’s relaxing, and it’s accessible because the people who play it look like they train by drinking beer and playing shuffleboard down at the neighborhood bar.

That makes sense because curling is Scottish in origin, and most Scottish sports, according to a colleague, begin with imbibing copious amounts of adult beverages and throwing rocks.

And curling involves throwing rocks, and the participants look like they should be standing around with beers in their hands.

As much as I love curling — I’ve watched hours of it, and I’m still not sure what they’re doing with those broom-like dealies — the Winter Olympics do need some more sports, particularly Scottish sports in which the contestants stand around with beers in their hands or have a lot of beers inside of them.

Which brings us to ferret-legging.

I was unaware of ferret-legging until a colleague, tired of lengthy discussions about the ins and outs of curling, sent me an e-mail containing a story about the sport. “Curling is for sissies,� she wrote. “This is a real man’s sport.�

The story — from the November 1992 edition of Harper’s magazine — describes a competition that has to be one of the greatest sports that might have been invented by drunken Scotsmen. Or drunken Englishmen. Or anybody.

And what makes it great is it involves, well, ferrets. Ferrets are weasels. Stupid weasels.

Here, according to the article, is what ferret-legging is:

“Basically, ferret-legging involves the tying of a competitor’s trousers at the ankles and the insertion into those trousers of a couple of peculiarly vicious fur-coated, foot-long carnivores called ferrets. The brave contestant’s belt is then pulled tight, and he proceeds to stand there in front of the judges as long as he can, while animals with claws like hypodermic needles and teeth like number 16 carpet tacks try their damnedest to get out.�

The origin of the sport is unclear. Some sources trace it to Scotland, and others to England. According to the article, the world-record holder is an Englishman named Reg Mellor from Yorkshire who kept a ferret — legged a ferret? — for five hours and 26 minutes, an impressively long time to have a weasel in your pants.

The Web site Weaselwords.com — all about weasels — says ferret-legging “is a silly English pub sport that has been around for centuries.� Yet another ferret-oriented Web site, ferretsmagazine.com, traces the sport’s roots to “merry olde England, when only the wealthy were allowed to own ferrets� leading “poor poachers� to “hide illegal ferrets in their trousers.�

The sport, they say, is either banned specifically or has fallen out of favor or has disappeared largely due to the reluctance of people to put wild animals with needle-like claws and carpet-tack-like teeth down their pants. On purpose.

Intrigued, I called Tony O’Connor at the Harp & Fiddle Pub on North George Street in York to further investigate. Now, Tony’s Irish, and I know that the Irish and the English and the Scots don’t like to be confused with one another. But I figured Ireland was in the general neighborhood, and he might have witnessed ferret-legging because, frankly, it sounds like the kind of thing you’d encounter in some of Ireland’s finer drinking establishments.

When I mentioned ferrets, Tony told me that, in Ireland, some people practice something called “lamping,� which isn’t as bad as it sounds. “Lamping� involves hunting for weasels and ferrets at night using lamps to blind the animals. Sounds like it would be fun, at least up to the point where Dick Cheney shoots someone.

And in Ireland, and the rest of the British isles, hunters use ferrets to scare up game, rabbits mostly.

Nothing about putting ferrets down their pants.

I told Tony what ferret-legging is, and I believe he’s still laughing.

“I never heard of that,� Tony said. “People would have to be pretty drunk to put ferrets down their pants.�

Anyway, he’d never seen it, and he wasn’t interested in it. “It’s a little too weird and kinky for me,� he said.

Other people, though, you never know.

And if the Olympic people come to their senses, we’ll be seeing it sometime soon.
Hopefully, in prime time.

It’d be a lot better than figure skating.

Mike Argento, whose column appears Mondays and Thursdays in Living and Sundays in Viewpoints, can be reached at 771-2046 or at mike@ydr.com.