Ferret-legging (by popular request)
Bill Keyes
your reading pleasure...
T H E K I N G O F T H E
F E R R E T L E G G E R S
A true story
DONALD KATZ
Mr. Reg Mellor, the "king of ferret-legging," paced across his tiny Yorkshire
miner's cottage as he explained the rules of the English sport that he has come
to dominate rather late in life. "Ay lad," said the 72-year-old champion, "no
jockstraps allowed. No underpants--nothin' whatever. And it's no good with
tight trousers, mind ye. Little bah-stards have to be able to move around
inside there from ankle to ankle."
Some 11 years ago I first heard of the strange pastime called ferret-legging,
and for a decade since then I have sought a publication possessed of sufficient
intelligence and vision to allovv me to travel to northern England in search of
the fabled players of the game.
Basically the contest involves the tying of a competitor's trousers at the
ankles and the subsequent insertion into those trousers of a couple of
peculiarly vicious fur-coated, footlong 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 damndest to get out.
>From a dark and obscure past, the sport has made an astonishing comeback in the
past 15 vears. When I first heard about ferret-legging, the world record stood
at 40 painful seconds of "keepin' 'em down," as the~ sav in ferret-legging
circles. A few years later the dreaded one-minute mark was finallv surpassed.
The current record--implausible as it may seem -- now stands at an awesome 5
hours and 26 minutes, a mark reached last year by the gaudily tattooed
72-year-old little Yorkshireman with the waxed military mustache who now stood
two feet away from me in the mi(ldle of the room, apparently undoing his
trousers.
"The ferrets must have a full mouth o' teeth," Reg Mellor said as he fiddled
with his belt. "No filing of the teeth; no clipping. No dope for you or the
ferrets. You must be sober, and the ferrets must be hungry -- though any
ferret'll eat yer eyes out even if he isn't hungry."
Reg Mellor lives several hours north of London atop the thick central seam of
British coal that once fueled the most powerful surge into modernity in the
world's history. He lives in the city of Barnsley, home to a quarter-million
downtrodden souls, and the brunt of many derisive jokes in Great Britain.
Barnsley was the subject of much national mirth recently when "the most
grievously mocked town in Yorkshire" -- a place people drive miles out of their
way to circumvent -- opened a tourist information center. Everyone thought that
was a good one.
When I stopped at the tourist ofhce and asked the astonished woman for a map,
she said, "Ooooh, a mup eees it, luv? No mups 'ere. Noooo." She did, however,
know the way to Reg Mellor's house. Reg is, after all, Barnsley's only reigning
king.
Finally, then, after 11 long years, I sat in front of a real ferret-legger,
a man among men. He stood now next to a glowing fire of Yorkshire coal as I
tried to interpret the primitive record of his long life, which is etched in
tattoos up and down his thick arms. Reg finally finished explaining the
technicalities of this burgeoning sport.
"So then, lad. Any more questions for I poot a few down for ye?"
"Yes, Reg."
"Ay, whoot then?"
"Well, Reg," I said. "I think people in America will want to know. Well . .
since you don't wear any protection . . . and, well, I've heard a ferret can
bite your thumb off. Do they ever -- you know?"
Reg's stiff mustache arched toward the ceiling under a sly grin. "You really
want to know what they get up to down there, 'eh?" Reg said, looking for all
the world like some working man's Long John Silver. "Well, take a good look."
Then Reg Mellor let his trousers fall around his ankles.
A SHORT DIGRESSION: A word is in order concerning ferrets, a weasel-like animal
well known to Europeans but, because of the near extinction of the black-footed
variety in the American West, not widely known in the United States.
Alternatively referred to by professional ferret-handlers as "shark-of-the-land"
a "piranha with feet," "fur-coated evil," and "the only four legged creature
in existence that kills just for kicks," the common domesticated ferret --
Mustela putorius -- has the spinal flexibility of a snake and the jaw
musculature of a pit bull. Rabbits, rats, and even frogs run screaming from
hiding places when confronted with a ferret. Ferreters -- those who hunt with
ferrets, as opposed to putting them in their pants -- sit around and tell tales
of rabbits running toward hunters to surrender after gazing into the torch-red
eyes of an oncoming ferret.
Before they were outlawed in New York State in the early part of the century,
ferrets were used to exterminate rats. A ferret with a string on its leg, it
was said, could knock off more than a hundred street-wise New York City rats
twice its size in an evening.
In England the amazing rise of ferret-legging pales before the new popularity
of keeping ferrets as pets, a trend replete with numerous tragic consequences.
A baby was killed and eaten in 1978, and several children have been mauled by
ferrets every year since then.
Loyal to nothing that lives, the ferret has only one characteristic that might
be deemed positive -- a tenacious, single-minded belief In finishing whatever
it starts. That usually entails biting off whatever it bites. The rules of
ferret-legging do allow the leggers to try to knock the ferret off a spot it's
biting (from outside the trousers only), but that is no small matter, as
ferrets never let go. No less a source than the Encyclopaedia Britannica
suggests that you can get a ferret to let go by pressing a certain spot over
its eye, but Reg Mellor and the other ferret specialists I talked to all say
that is absurd. Reg favors a large screwdriver to get a ferret off his finger.
Another ferret-legger told me that a ferret that had almost dislodged his left
thumb let go only after the ferret and the man's thumb were held under scalding
tap water--for ten minutes.
Mr. Graham Wellstead, the head of the British Ferret and Ferreting Society,
says that little is known of the diseases carried by the ferret because
veterinarians are afraid to touch them.
Reg Mellor, a man who has been more intimate with ferrets than many men have
been with their wives, calls ferrets "cannibals, things that live only to kill,
that'll eat your eyes out to get at your brain" at their worst, and
"untrustworthy" at their very best.
Reg says he observed with wonder the growing popularity of ferret-legging
throughout the seventies. He had been hunting with ferrets in the verdant moors
and dales outside of Barnsley for much of a century. Since a cold and wet ferret
exterminates with a little less enthusiasm than a dry one, Reg used to keep his
ferrets in his pants for hours when he hunted in the rain -- and it always
rained where he hunted.
"The world record was 60 seconds. Sixty seconds! I can stick a ferret up me ass
longer than that."
So at 69, Reg Mellor found his game. As he stood in front of me now, naked from
the waist down, Reg looked every bit a champion.
"So look close," he said again.
I did look, at an incredible tattoo of a zaftig woman on Rog's thigh. His legs
appeared crosshatched with scars. But I refused to "look close," saying
something about not being paid enough for that.
"Come on, Reg," I said. "Do they bite your -- you know?"
"Do they!" he thundered with irritation as he pulled up his pants.
"Why, I had 'em hangin' off me--"
Reg stopped short because a woman who was with me, a London television
reporter, had entered the cottage. I suddenly feared that I would never know
from what the raging ferrets dangle. Reg offered my friend a chair with the
considerable gallantry of a man who had served in the Queen's army for more
than 20 years. Then he said to her, "Are ye cheeky, luv?"
My friend looked confused.
"Say yes," I hissed.
"Yes."
"Why," Reg roared again, "I had 'em hangin' from me tool for hours an' hours
an' hours! Two at a time -- one on each side. I been swelled up as big as that!"
Reg pointed to a five-pound can of instant coffee.
I then made the mistake of asking Reg Mellor if his age allowed him the
impunity to be the most daring ferret-legger in the world.
"And what do ye mean by that?" he said.
"Well, I just thought since you probably aren't going to have any more
children...."
"Are you sayin' I ain't pokin' 'em no more?" Reg growled with menace. "Is
that your meaning? Cause I am pokin' 'em for sure."
A small red hut sits in an overgrown yard outside Reg Mellor's door. "Come
outta there, ye bah-stards," Reg yelled as he flailed around the inside of the
hut looking for some ferrets that had just arrived a few hours earlier. He
emerged with two dirty white animals, which he held quite firmly by their necks.
They both had fearsome unblinking eyes as hard and red as rubies.
Reg thrust one of them at me, and I suddenly thought that he intended the
ferret to avenge my faux pas concerning his virility; so I began to run for a
fence behind which my television friend was already standing because she
refused to watch. Reg finally got me to take one of the ferrets by its steel
cable of a neck while he tied his pants at the ankle and prepared to "put em
down."
A young man named Malcolm, with a punk haircut, came into the yard on a
motorbike. "You puttin' 'em down again, Reg?" Malcolm asked. Reg took the
ferret from my bloodless hand and stuck the beast's head deep into his mouth.
"Oh yuk, Reg," said Malcolm.
Reg pulled the now quite embittered-looking ferret out of his mouth and stuffed
it and another ferret into his pants. He cinched his belt tight, clenched his
fists at his sides, and gazed up into the gray Yorkshire firmament in what I
guessed could only be a gesture of prayer. Claws and teeth now protruded all
over Reg's hyperactive trousers. The two bulges circled round and round one
leg, getting higher and higher, and finally . . . they went up and over to the
other leg.
"Thank God," I said.
"Yuk, Reg," said Malcolm.
"The claws," I managed, "Aren't they sharp, Reg?"
"Ay," said Reg laconically. "Ay."
Reg Mellor gives all the money he makes from ferret-legging to the local
children's home. As with all great champions, he has also tried to bring more
visibility to the sport that has made him famous. One Mellor innovation is the
introduction of white trousers at major competitions ("shows the blood
better").
Mellor is a proud man. Last year he retired from professional ferret-legging in
disgust after attempting to break a magic six-hour mark -- the four-minute-mile
of ferret-legging. After five hours of having them down, Mellor found that
almost all of the 2,500 spectators had gone home. Then workmen came and began
to dismantle the stage, despite his protestations that he was on his way to a
new record. "I'm not packing it in because I am too old or because I can't take
the bites anymore," Reg told reporters after the event, "I am just too
disillusioned."
One of the ferrets in Reg s pants finally poked its nose into daylight before
any major damage was done, and Reg pulled the other ferret out. We all went
across the road to the local pub, where everyone but Reg had a drink to calm
the nerves. Reg doesn't drink. Bad for his health, he says.
Reg said he had been coaxed out of retirement recently and intends to break six
-- "maybe even eight" -- hours within the year.
Some very big Yorkshiremen stood around us in the pub. Some of them claimed
they had bitten the heads off sparrows, shrews, and even rats, but none of them
would compete with Reg Mellor. One can only wonder what suffering might have
been avoided if the Argentine junta had been informed that sportsmen in England
put down their pants animals that are known only for their astonishingly
powerful bites and their penchant for insinuating themselves into small dark
holes. Perhaps the generals would have reconsidered their actions on the
Falklands.
But Reg Mellor refuses to acknowledge that his talent is made of the stuff of
heroes, of a mixture of indomitable pride, courage, concentration, and artless
grace. "Naw noon o' that," said the king. "You just got be able ta have your
tool bitten and not care."