NQR : Topgallant : Rants

Weasels, Ferrets, and Draco Malfoy.

Originally posted May 15, 2004:

For

weatherby, let me just make the disclaimer at the beginning of this post that I am utterly delighted that we have new canon. NEW CANON YAY YAY YAY. I am horrified that a character named Malfalda Weasley was almost in Slytherin and nearly upstaged Rita Skeeter, who is one of my favorite characters. I am horrified that Hermione was almost named Puckle. I am absolutely brokenhearted that the scene at Malfoy Manor with Draco got cut. Reading about the basis for Gilderoy Lockhart makes me want to do a songvid to "You're So Vain." And I love Nearly Headless Nick's song. I love this website. It has renewed my love for J.K. Rowling, who really is wonderful to her fans.

Now that I have said that, let me dive into talking about the one subject which must necessarily consume me at the moment: more information about Draco Malfoy.

This is a really long essay thingy, so I will give you the condensed version first. Courtesy of Orphne, and, er, Joss Whedon.

1. [weasel] = [ron]
2. but JKR said the family name
3. [insert pictures of all the various animals] including [badger] = [hufflepuff badge] and ferret = [draco]
4. ferrets were almost extinct! [ferrets with x's over their eyes]
5. but they were not! [happy ferrets]
6. weasels and ferrets are often misunderstood [sad weasels and ferrets] [angry people]
7. just as draco is misunderstood! [draco looking sulky]
8. people should understand draco [draco/harry snogging]
9. orphne: the end.

This essay is dedicated to the author of this fic. If you have to pick between reading the essay or reading this fic--please don't read this fic.

I have been thinking of little else regarding canon but the question of Draco lately--his possibilities for redemption, lack thereof; pretty much everything we were talking about on the Draco panel at Nimbus last year.

So it's not really that surprising that, reading all the wonderful wealth of new canon JKR has given us at www.jkrowling.com, this immediately jumped out at me.

In the section under Characters (under Extras--click the coffee cup), she writes the following regarding the Weasleys:

"In Britain and Ireland the weasel has a bad reputation as an unfortunate, even malevolent, animal. However, since childhood I have had a great fondness for the family mustelidae; not so much malignant as maligned, in my opinion."

What interests me most is that here J.K. Rowling clearly had an opportunity, since she was talking about the Weasleys and their connection to the weasel, to limit her hints of redemption to the weasel itself. But she didn't; she expanded her reference to the entire family. Which just happens to include the ferret.

I've always wondered if there was any connection between her linking the Weasleys to the weasel so obviously, and her turning Draco into a ferret. It is one of the types of things you think of when you are trying to determine every possible angle from which to approach a character given the relatively little information you have about him. It has always been a possibility for me that it was intentional; now that Rowling has made this statement, I'm certain that it was.

We learn in Book 5 that the Weasleys and the Malfoys are distantly related. Moreover it is widely acknowledged throughout the wizarding world that most pureblood wizards are related in some way or other. So when JKR chooses her wording to refer not just to weasels but to "weasels, stoats, polecats, ferrets, mink, marten, fishers, tayras, wolverines, grisons, badgers, skunks, otters, and others," according to the Animal Diversity website, one wonders if she was not in fact implying a commonality of more than blood. She certainly seems to me to be referencing the homogeny of the wizarding world, between the opposite ends of the pureblood wizarding scale, the Malfoys and the Weasleys. But she is also, you can argue--and I do--referencing the general theme that seems to run throughout the books: the prejudice and sweeping assumptions that members of both the Malfoy family and the Weasley family encounter. It is impossible not to note the fact that among the much-maligned Mustelids are badgers--Hufflepuffs are often written off by the other houses but prove their worth as loyal, hardy team players--and ferrets. Both Hufflepuff and the two sets of wizarding families are constantly judged on the basis of their names only, and on legends belonging to generations of house/family lore and reputation, rather than on their deeds and misdeeds.

According to Animal Diversity, mustelids are agile carnivores, excellent hunters with an acute sense of hearing. They are also the largest family of carnivores, containing 65 species in all. The weasel and the ferret are both species of the Genus Mustela, which is related under the subfamily Mustelinae; they are, if you will, first cousins. this is a picture of a long-tailed weasel. As you can see, it looks a hell of a lot like the ferret.

There are only 2 species of ferrets: the black-footed ferret (Mustela nigripes) and the European Domestic Ferret (Mustela Putorius). The European Domestic ferret is more properly a descendant of the European polecat and has been bred as a popular pet and used for hunting for thousands of years. They cannot survive in the wild but live for up to 10 years as pets. They are well known as being playful, fastidious, attention-seekers, and are very charismatic pets—often exhibiting exuberant and exaggerated body movements and being very “vocal.”

The black-footed ferret is the single most endangered species in North America. It was thought to be completely extinct as a species until 1981. The early 1980s saw 18 ferrets rescued by biologists, literally all that remained of the species in the wild. Since then the black-footed ferret has been slowly reintroduced into the wild in North America, primarily through breeding in captivity. Their survival depends on the survival of their main food, the prairie dog. One biologist wrote in 1918 that the U.S. government’s policy of eradicating the western prairie dog population was destined to drive the black-footed ferret into extinction, and he was right. Today less than a hundred known ferrets exist in the wild, and there are only 10 prairie dog populations remaining in the west that can sustain more of them.

The process of extinction of the pure species of black-footed ferret closely resembles the extinction of wizards, as they were literally hunted down and made unable to survive by the destruction of their natural habitat; one might say that the ferret’s reliance on the prairie dog is analogous to the wizarding world’s reliance on magic. When the growing expansion of Muggles brought them into contact with magical elements they sought to stamp out the thing that they considered a threat: exterminating magic meant extermination of the entire wizarding population, until they were forced to crossbreed in order to survive. Recently scientists have been using another form of cross-breeding, artificial insemination of European domestic ferrets, in order to aid the breeding of black-footed ferrets. Ferrets are able to live in the wild only with the help of men; wizards are able to exist as a race only with the help of Muggles.

Ferrets live in complex underground tunnel systems, very closely resembling what we know to be the underground infrastructure of the dungeons at Hogwarts. Their nocturnal habits coincide with the shadowy nighttime activities of not only Death Eaters, but Draco when he follows the trio to Hagrid’s hut in PS. Their domestic counterparts are often bred for their fur--sable and albino being the most sought after, just as the albino, Aryan-like physical appearance of the Malfoys signifies at once their pure bloodline and their high breeding. Draco exhibits all the characteristics of a ferret: he is alert and watchful, especially attuned to the goings-on of the trio; and, as far as we can tell, he has his nose to the wind for all information he can get about his father's activities. Like the ferret, he is certainly vocal; like the ferret he is often at once loud, attention-seeking, curious, and exaggerational.

It has always been my opinion that all arguments that Draco Malfoy is simply misunderstood rather than evil ultimately center around the Ferret Scene. In this one scene is encompassed at once Draco's crudeness, his malevolence, his humor and his appeal--and his power to incite a hurt/comfort response in many of the readers. In this one scene we see more of his character truly exposed than we have in arguably any other scene except his "I'll have you" confrontation with Harry in Book 5. I have read countless arguments over whether the bouncing ferret punishment was suitable for his crime, and I have read countless arguments about whether this scene is meant to subtly incite sympathy for Draco in older readers--as it very obviously does, whether or not it is intended to do so. Above all, one of the things I think it's very easy to say about this scene is that Draco reacts like any normal boy would after having something like this happen to him--he is no cardboard bully here, no twisted evil death eater youth in training; he is a boy who has been incredibly humiliated and has possibly just undergone a rather traumatic physical experience. He manages to keep his composure, and come off without any extra loss of dignity at the hands of a character who really does turn out to be evil. Whatever else you can say about him, Draco Malfoy manages to endure a great deal of personal humiliation and, like a true Slytherin hero, get right back up and keep at the Sisyphean task that defines his role in the ecosystem of Hogwarts--competing with Potter and friends within an often-hostile environment, in an ongoing struggle to re-establish Slytherin at the top of the food chain. One might say he is, in a way, acting in a manner true to his mustela counterparts, who have managed to survive for so long against the constant threats of extinction and displacement, and severely unfavorable odds against them.

One scientist has called the ferret “the least studied and the most poorly known of all the major mammals in North America.” If it is, in fact, JKR's intention to include the entirety of the Mustelidae family in her judgment of 'unfairly maligned,' then her choice to associate Draco with the ferret could have interesting ramifications for the book's subtext--for its perspective on Slytherins, on the Malfoy family, on Pureblood wizards in general. Perhaps if we were to study Draco Malfoy, we would come to see him, not as a product of evil, but as a product of a species whose natural habitat has been taken from them, and who must be carefully re-integrated into an utterly different environment. If we are to believe in the Weasleys as a misunderstood breed, then we must also believe in the Malfoys as a misunderstood breed. In this case, it's very possible that Draco Malfoy's future might depend upon the wizarding world's attempting to understand him rather than exclude him--by withholding its judgments, and enabling him to reintegrate himself into a mixed environment where Muggles and wizards cohabit.

After all--no one questions the moral code of an endangered species. They simply work to ensure its survival.

Sources used for this entry:
ADW: Mustelidae : Information and sublinks
Black-Footed Ferrets Making a Comeback Through Artificial Insemination, National Geographic Today
Animal Info – Black-Footed Ferret.

(In conclusion, I think Harry should read up on ferrets, and then snog Draco a lot. Thank you.)