---
title: 'We can''t invent a robot better than these ferrets'
source: 'https://youtube.com/watch?v=Mi_fYfpycT0'
video_id: 'Mi_fYfpycT0'
date: 2026-06-22
duration_sec: 1293
---

# We can't invent a robot better than these ferrets

> Source: [We can't invent a robot better than these ferrets](https://youtube.com/watch?v=Mi_fYfpycT0)

## Summary

This video explores the National Ferret School in Derbyshire, where ferrets are trained for practical tasks like hunting rabbits and pulling cables through pipes. The host learns about ferret behavior, handling, and their surprising utility over industrial robots.

### Key Points

- **Ferrets vs. Industrial Robots** [0:00] — The host claims ferrets outperform industrial robots in certain tasks, such as navigating narrow pipes.
- **National Ferret School Explained** [0:18] — The school is both for people to learn ferret care and for training ferrets, highlighting their historical use for hunting rabbits.
- **Ferret Biology and Terminology** [1:20] — Ferrets are domesticated European polecats (mustelids). Males are hobs, females are jills, and juveniles are kits.
- **Historical Ferret Bite Incident** [2:17] — A 1977 clip shows Richard Whiteley being bitten by a ferret, leading to a hospital visit, but the ferret recovered.
- **Ferret Curiosity and Training** [4:21] — Ferrets are naturally nosy, which is utilized in training. They learn by following older ferrets and through Pavlovian conditioning with food rewards.
- **Ferret Duties: Rabbit Hunting and Cable Pulling** [6:04] — Ferrets are used to flush rabbits from warrens and pull cables through underground pipes, a real application for events like Charles and Diana's wedding.
- **Ferrets in the Bible** [11:52] — Ferrets are mentioned in Leviticus 11:30 (King James Bible), but this is likely a mistranslation of a lizard. It shows ferrets were well-known in 17th-century England.
- **Ferret Finder Telemetry** [14:55] — A collar with a transmitter (Ferret Finder) allows tracking ferrets underground, beeping faster as they get closer.
- **Cable Pulling Demonstration** [18:32] — A ferret in a harness pulls a string through a pipe, which can then be used to pull larger cables. The demonstration shows the ferret's effectiveness despite obstacles.

### Conclusion

Ferrets remain valuable for tasks like cable pulling and pest control, often outperforming robots due to their agility and problem-solving skills.

## Transcript

I met some ferrets that do a better job
than industrial robots.
The road trip took me back
to the East Midlands,
to the county of Derbyshire,
and I parked up at a small rural farm
that’s the home
of the National Ferret School.
Which does need some explanation.
The first question is:
is the National Ferret School
a school about ferrets,
or a school for ferrets?
Also, what is a ferret?
So, this is where we keep our ferrets.
This is the traditional way
of keeping ferrets.
We believe the Romans carried ferrets
around the world with them
because they spread the rabbit,
and the only way to get a rabbit,
or the best way to get a rabbit
out from underground,
is to have something chase it out,
ergo the ferret.
And so people respected them,
and they kept them in large enclosures
known as courts.
And that’s exactly what we do now. 
-A ferret court!
Correct.
So we should see a Pavlovian reflex now... 
-Oh, hello!
Because when I come to feed them, I go...
(makes kissing noises)
Oh hello!
Those are ferrets.
And James, who runs the ferret school,
wrote the book on them.
Uh, literally, this is his book.
And so the school is both for people:
to learn ferret handling and care
and rearing,
and also to train ferrets.
Because it turns out they can be
very useful creatures,
and not just for hunting rabbits.
So, ferrets are...
I’m going to get my terminology
wrong here, mustelids?
They are indeed.
And ferrets are domesticated
European polecats.
Right.
So many domesticated ferrets have been
released into the wild over the years...
-Oh, that they’ve cross-bred?
 -Correct.
-Right.
 -But, either way, they’re the same animal.
And the more I see of wild polecats,
the more certain I am that these are them.
-Did that one just sneeze?
 -Yes.
(laughs)
My apologies, I was not able
to put a microphone on a sneezing ferret.
I don’t know how queasy your viewers are,
but we feed these complete carcasses.
Right okay.
So at whatever stage in the day,
I can throw one in,
and then you’ll see furry locusts descend
on them, and they’ll disappear.
And you see,
they’re still coming out of bed, look.
Awh.
Don’t worry, I’m not going to show
the ferret feeding frenzy.
But I did have one concern
before going into the shed,
and to explain why
I wasn’t going to be handling the ferrets,
I need to make a callback to 1977.
Ow. Ow. Ow!
I’m sorry. Ow!
Richard Whiteley, legendary
Yorkshire news anchor and interviewer,
host of game show Countdown
for more than 20 years,
joked that when he died,
his obituary would read:
“Ferret man dies!”
The clip of him being bitten by a ferret
on his talk show
got played around the world,
often with a big audience laugh
added over it.
And it seems like a bit of harmless fun,
but despite the laughter of the crew,
the man’s clearly in a lot of pain.
It’s alright, let it go.
Put it on the floor, it won’t hurt you.
It is hurting me.
It was rushed out.
Emergency centre.
Complete blood transfusion.
Intravenous antibiotics
for about three weeks.
But thank God
the ferret made a complete recovery.
(laughs)
Oh, I fell for that completely!
I’m assured that the ferret was fine,
and so was Richard Whiteley,
but not wanting to end up
with the same fate,
I let James handle the ferrets.
In you come.
Come on, in you come, in you come.
Oop.
Hello.
Whoops.
-You want to come in? 
-Yep. I don’t want to stand on a ferret.
I imagine they’re smart enough
to get out of the way of my feet.
-Nope. 
-Oh, they’re not. Okay.
They’ll go under your feet to see what
the underneath of your feet look like.
(laughs)
Hello.
Oh hi!
I would think you would pick up the aroma.
Yes, a little bit.
Okay.
But there are 20 ferrets in here. 
-(laughs)
There’s going to be a bit of laughter
from me behind the camera,
because there were ferrets
trying to climb up my trouser leg.
Thankfully, only the outside
of my trouser leg.
The specific name for these
is “Mustela putorius furo”.
-Uh-huh.
 -“Mustela” is a weasel.
Yes.
“Putorius” is where we get the word
putrid, very smelly.
Oh okay.
-And “furo” is a thief. 
-Sorry...
So these guys are technically called
“thieving smelly weasels”.
Incredible. And that, I presume,
is their bedroom?
-That’s the nest box, yes. 
-Right.
I’m smiling a lot here, but also,
they are trying to climb up my leg.
Yes.
Well, the thing about ferrets,
and this is what we utilise,
is that they are nosy.
So when you were doing
the research for this,
you were ferreting out the information.
Yes, I was!
Ferrets always want to know:
what is in there?
What is up there, what is through there?
What’s around that corner?
That’s what they do.
So, 20 ferrets, if I had 20 sheep,
it would be a flock,
20 cows, a herd,
20 ferrets, it’s a business. 
-Oh!
Because as soon as you put a couple
together, they start ferreting around,
doing their business.
Right! Oh. Yes, hello.
They’ve...they have
discovered the camera.
I’m working on the assumption
that these are working animals,
and in the same way that a farmer
does not name individual sheep in a flock,
you do not name individual ferrets here.
No, but what we do do is we implant a chip
under the skin,
and we can scan that,
and we keep all the records on a computer.
So are you breeding them?
They do that on their own.
(laughs)
We supervise it.
Yes.
Sorry...
someone is very, very interested
in my jeans here.
Hello.
Yes. Hi.
A vet once described ferrets
as “short-legged cats with attitude”.
-Yeah. I can believe that.
 -And I think that’s a perfect description.
A juvenile ferret,
like all of the ones in that court,
is called a kit.
The males are hobs,
and the females, jills.
How to tell those apart...
The easiest way to tell
is to look at the size of the head.
The jills, the females,
have a nice slender head like this one.
But if you look at that guy,
big broad head.
-Yep.
 -That’s a hob.
And the hobs can be twice the size
of the jills.
So at some point,
they’re going to be old enough,
and you’ll have to separate them out?
Well, these are just this year’s, these
are just about three, four months old.
By this time next year,
all the hobs will be living separately,
except when they’re doing their duties.
Aside from the obvious, though,
those ferrets have other duties,
one of which is to chase out rabbits
from their warrens
by diving down into the rabbit-holes.
Rabbits are considered
a major agricultural pest,
and unpleasant as it might be,
under English law,
almost all landowners are required to kill
any wild rabbits living on their land.
In practice, that’s not happening
everywhere, it’s not really enforced,
but certainly, farmers would appreciate
not having to put down poison
when other options are available.
But that’s not the job
we’re talking about here.
There are other reasons
to send ferrets ferreting around.
And training them
turns out to not be that difficult.
What I will do, when we start using them
for rabbiting later in the year,
is take an adult out
and put a youngster at its heel,
and then it follows through,
and it learns from its elders,
in the same way that most animals do.
It’s how they train foxhounds.
They couple them together. 
-Yeah.
So, they literally learn the ropes.
But other than that,
the main training is handling them.
Because one of the first questions
I get asked when I talk about ferrets
is do they bite? 
-Yep.
They have teeth. They are capable.
-Yep.
 -I have a very strange allergy.
And my doctor’s warned me about it.
I’m allergic to pain.
-Yes!
 -I’ve found pain hurts me.
Yeah, no, same, same, I’ve got that.
-So I avoid that. 
-Really?
So, we start handling them at four weeks.
Their eyes start to open
about four and a half weeks.
There is this big pink thing
coming down out of the sky,
and they learn quickly
that this is not going to hurt them.
Quite the opposite.
Then they don’t bite.
And then we start doing the Pavlovian bit
of conditioning them
that a certain noise means good things.
Food. 
-Right.
One of those is really trying to get
into your shoe there.
Yes, I get through a lot of boots
on this job, yes.
They love climbing.
And all we try to do in here,
this, if you like,
this is their training ground.
So, we’ve got pipes,
we’ve got branches,
we’ve got all this substrate here
that they can dig through,
and they just learn
to do all the different things.
It keeps them fit and healthy,
and no matter how hot or cold it is,
somewhere in here
is the right temperature for them.
So, in the cold,
they can go into the bed, the nest box.
In the winter,
we stuff that full of barley straw.
If there’s too much, they drag it out. 
-Yep.
If it looks like it’s getting colder,
I will put some more in,
and they will take it in.
There’s a lot of rattling
coming from inside this pipe just here.
And I assume at some point...
Careful with the feet...
 -No, he’s going back down.
Oh, he’s coming back down, okay.
My camera was jumping around there,
because the ferret was turning round,
back and forth, inside a piece of tubing
that was about the width of the ferret,
which seems like it shouldn’t be possible
for a creature with a spine.
They have articulated vertebrae,
a bendy backbone.
So, we all think that we’re fit
if we can touch our toes.
-Yeah.
 -Some people are double-jointed,
and they can sit with their chin
on their bottom like that.
(laughs)
But what none of us can do is put
our left ear on our left ankle like that.
Oh!
Or our right ear on our right ankle,
like that.
And if that was hurting her at all,
she would let me know.
That’s a very unbothered ferret there.
There you go. And over the years,
I’ve learned tricks myself,
but also most of this comes
from Graham, the gamekeeper
who taught me a lot.
And so he always said, if you pick up
a ferret that’s a bit uptight,
maybe it’s just come out of a warren
and it’s had a fight with a rat
or something down there,
then all you do is hold it like thus,
and then swing it
and thread it through your hands like this
and you can see just how relaxed it goes,
and if I do that a few times...
To be clear, the ferret
is okay with that, right?
Well, as you can see, look,
and it just mesmerises them, literally.
(laughs)
And some will stay like this for five
or ten minutes, some for a few seconds,
and if the wind’s blowing,
they come out of it much quicker.
But it just works,
and I’ve never ever
had any where it doesn’t work.
Wow. Yeah,
that’s a slightly sleepy ferret.
(laughter)
-But now, look, she’s up and off again. 
-Yeah.
I don’t know if your microphone’s
picking that up.
There’s some noise, certainly.
(cheeping)
What’s that noise?
-That’s the noise that they make. 
-Right.
It’s uh yeah...
They make that when they’re interested... 
-Yep.
....when they’re unsure,
and when they’re excited.
But when they’re excited,
it’s called “dooking”,
and they bounce around on all fours
and make this silly noise,
and their head goes backwards
and forwards, and their mouth opens,
and a lot of people seeing that
think the ferret is about to kill you
and rip you to pieces or something. 
-Right.
It’s just having a whale of a time.
Here you go, climbing. 
-Oh, hello!
Oh yeah, happily...
...happily six feet up.
 -So, she’s, yep, no problem whatsoever.
Oh, she’s taking the civilised way down.
Normally, they simply let go.
Yep.
They bounce very well.
And at the moment we’ve got this...
Oh! And you were right.
There goes...thank you. Thank you.
I’m just being very careful with my feet.
I’m going to go and recover...
my camera.
The trouble is, there is now a ferret
in the way of my camera.
There we go. Woah. Ha!
I’m going to just remove myself
from this cloud of ferrets here.
-(laughs) 
-That’s the ferrets.
The next question is
what can you do with them?
What can you do with ferrets,
other than flush out rabbits?
Well, one thing about humans is
we often build underground infrastructure,
narrow pipes that carry cables or stuff.
Which is all well and good
until there’s a problem somewhere inside
one of those pipes,
and you need to dig all of it up
to find the problem.
It’d be really useful if you could locate
where exactly you needed to dig first.
Although, while we were going to set
that demonstration up,
James told me something
that sent me off on a research tangent,
and it’s fascinating,
and I just have to cover this first.
If you turn to the Old Testament,
the book of Leviticus,
that’s where God lists things
that you can do and you can’t do.
And there is a list of animals
that you are not allowed to eat,
ferrets are featured on them,
which means they were common.
James is right.
Ferrets are mentioned
in the King James Bible, Leviticus 11:30,
“and the ferret, and the chameleon,
and the lizard, and the snail,
“and the mole, those are unclean to you.”
But that’s the King James Bible,
a staple of the Church of England
and some Protestant denominations.
And I’m not a theologian, but,
from what I’ve looked up,
“ferret” in there
is almost certainly a mistranslation.
The original word is “anaqah”,
and modern translators are pretty sure
that that means a type of lizard or gecko,
which would have been a really common
creature for that time and place.
But that’s not certain,
because the original isn’t in Hebrew,
it’s in Biblical Hebrew.
And I tried to find an English analogy
for how old that is, but there isn’t one,
because even Old English wouldn’t exist
for a thousand years at that point.
So, when the King James Bible
was translated
in England in the 17th century,
those scholars, who were mostly
going off other, earlier translations,
and who’d never
probably even heard of a gecko,
let alone seen one, they picked “ferret”.
Which doesn’t tell us much about
the author’s original intentions,
but it does tell us something about
ferrets in the 17th century.
It means they were so well known
that they were used
as a point of reference
in the English version of the Bible.
You couldn’t eat them, so the only reason
you would keep them would be for work.
And so they hunt with them
exactly as we do.
Anyway, James and I....
okay, mostly James,
but James and I set up a course
for a ferret.
Oh, do you want a hand with that?
Yes, if you grab that
and just walk slowly.
I see it.
Problem with this stuff is it’s a pain
in the backside to do anything with.
That’s a huge amount of corrugated pipe.
-It’s like fighting an octopus. 
-(laughs)
That’s a tiny square pipe.
They’ll go through that?
 -Oh, yes.
Yeah yeah yeah.
That’s a recipe for escape that, isn’t it?
I’ve put them in the wrong order there.
Don’t worry.
I don’t know how tightly this will fit in.
They might just clamber around it.
That’s what I was thinking.
No, that should work.
-That’ll do it?
 -Yep. And then we can do...
And then catch them at the other end.
Oh, wait, I’m sorry. A ferret...
a ferret is in this pipe already.
 -Is it really?
Yes. Someone’s just poked
their head out here.
(laughter)
Hello!
What are you doing, girly? Hey?
Come on, then.
Come on.
She’s going to be
slightly concerned now because...
Yes, she is. I’ll hold very still.
Come on.
Come on.
Ah, you little devil.
Just a bit further.
Thank you.
And it’s not like you could shake the pipe
to get the ferret out.
-No. 
-Because the ferret can climb!
Just keep your eye on it in case...
In case there’s another one in there!
We had a pipe
for the ferret to go through.
And that ferret’s first job
would be to see if the pipe is blocked,
and if so, where.
But if the ferret’s deep underground,
how can you tell where the blockage is?
This is the telemetry.
-Right.
 -And they wear this.
This is shaped so it fits under the chin.
And you’re not catching anything,
which is important.
This has various controls on,
but basically...
(beeping) 
Oh!
And you should be able to see
all the lights.
It’s called the Ferret Finder!
The Ferret Finder version 3, as well.
 -Indeed.
And if I move it away...
(beeping rises and falls
with distance)
Name that tune. 
-That’s delightful.
I think that might be
the most surreal thing
that’s happened on this road trip so far.
No matter how often they have these on,
they love to make it
as difficult as possible for me.
(laughs)
So, we put it round,
and they don’t have a neck.
-Oh!
 -And as you put it on, you think,
“That’s tight enough.”
Immediately, if you let go,
they get out of it.
-Right.
 -So you usually put it on to the next one.
That looks really tight,
but that’s all fur, isn’t it?
-It is indeed. 
-That’s fluff.
So, there we go!
So, if I leave this here...
Oh, yes, good point.
Let me turn that...
(beeping lowers)
Oh, you’ve got sensitivity calculation
on it, right.
There you go. So you should hear it
when it goes past there now.
So, we’ve got all the way up there
and back.
How fast is a ferret?
Turns out very fast,
as long as there isn’t a big
camera-holding maroon-and-blue blob
that looks like a predator
in their line of sight.
You ready?
(scurrying)
(chuckles)
(ferret finder beeps)
So, she’s past that.
-Oh, that was fast! Hello!
 -She’s continuing.
And she’s here, look.
This will be interesting
’cos she can see out,
and she’s not used to doing this. 
-Mm.
Nope, doesn’t like it. Oh!
You’re right, she doesn’t like that.
The ferret looked at me,
looked at my camera,
and then promptly went back to the start,
something we only knew
when the ferret finder beeped again.
-She’s gone back.
 -She heard it.
(chuckles)
Decided did not like the clear pipe there,
that’s fair enough.
Let’s try her again.
I’ll stay behind this time
in case my presence was putting her off.
(ferret finder beeps)
So fast!
It was, it was me standing there.
And then a tiny pipe.
That’s a tiny...
I’ve got no idea where...
Now you’ve got
a bottle of something there.
This is salmon oil.
This is their treat.
They’d trade their granny for this.
(makes kissing noises)
Hello?
(makes kissing noises)
Good girl. Come on then.
Good girl, what’s this?
Awh.
Mm-mm-mm.
So clicking...
Yep.
...that just tells her you’ve done well,
and the reward is the oil.
We don’t give them lots of it,
otherwise it tends to not be such a treat.
But I think she’s done a really good job
there this morning.
-With a completely new layout...
 -Indeed.
...with clear bits in it and some idiot
looming over her with a camera.
Yeah, that’s a pretty good job, that is.
And she’s never run through
the clear bits before.
So, the pipe is not blocked.
But there is a second use for ferrets
and industrial pipes.
Sure, there are robots you can send in
to do that sort of investigation,
you could send a snaking camera down there
or just an automated crawler,
but as I’ll show you in a bit,
the ferret’s probably better at the job.
And it’s also probably better
at pulling cables.
What if you already have
the underground pipe,
and you want to put a new piece
of cable through it?
-High-vis vest. 
-It’s a ferret harness!
It’s a high-vis vest for a ferret!
There you go.
And again, probably tries to make it
as difficult for me as she can,
because that’s what they do.
We fit it on. Oops.
You’ve had some experience with that,
haven’t you? That was smooth.
Round there, fasten it up
as tightly as we can.
And again, you have to remember
that these guys can breathe in,
are very supple, and,
although you may think
I’m putting that on too tightly,
I can guarantee
she’ll get out of it if you don’t.
So, she has a line on the end.
This is a Heath Robinson device
I’ve knocked up
that feeds it out without it tangling.
We made the run a bit simpler for this,
because the corrugated pipe wasn’t
quite wide enough to fit my camera down.
And so the plan is:
the ferret pulls the string,
we attach the string to the camera,
we send the camera back down for
a ferret’s-eye view for the final shot.
Oh, she’s moving!
Because that’s how cable-pulling works:
the ferret can’t carry a camera,
but it can pull a string.
And this is a real thing that happens
to run cables,
including, famously, for the TV coverage
of the wedding of Charles and Diana.
Hello!
Nope.
Didn’t like the, uh...
I think didn’t like me there.
That might have been me.
There she goes.
Yep. I need to learn
to stay back with this.
That string,
once it’s through, can be used to pull
a bigger string, and a bigger cable,
and so on, and so on, and so on,
until the cable you want
is through the pipe.
And there she is. Hello!
Why not just use a robot?
Or a simple machine?
Well, granted, my camera on a stick
is not a particularly intelligent device,
but if you want a perfect demonstration
of why ferrets are still used for this...
let’s just say running the camera through
didn’t exactly go smoothly.
So, ferret ran the cable.
Cable attached to stick.
Stick attached to camera.
Ferret’s-eye view whenever you’re ready.
Okay.
Go!
Go on.
It was a valiant effort.
Hang on.
Try that.
Turns out there are many things
where four legs
might still be the best way to do it.
Well, it wasn’t one smooth run,
but it got the job done.
Yeah. I’m amazed it did.
-Thank you very much, sir.
 -You’re welcome!
Next time, or right now
on Nebula:
an ancient ritual
shrouded in mystery
where I end up
in just a little bit of pain.
That’s not clickbait,
it’s actually a mysterious ancient ritual.