Thank you!

The Preydator. 🤔

Yep. I think it was. Probably expected a mouse! :-)

Stoat?

The whole mustelid family is full of really cool animals. + the marbled polecat looks like somebody stuffed their ferret into some old beanie babies. Crazy looking guys.

Thanx - I was trying to figure out just what that critter was.

You probably just have a ferret. If you bought it at a pet store its definitely a ferret. Polecats and Ferrets are two different species in the same family... closely related but with two very major distinctions. Polecats are NOT DOMESTICATED... they are Wild Animals. Ferrets have two thousand years of domestication in them... also, because of this difference, Polecats have much stronger bites than a ferret and is an excellent predator in the wild... most domestic Ferrets would simply perish in the wild from lack of natural hunting skills and weaker bite strength from two thousand years of selective breading where these traits just weren't needed and have mostly been bred-out of existence. As close cousins they do appear nearly identical at a glance, but are distinctly different species.

​@@wolfshanze5980They are called polecat ferrets because when they have the same face markings, not sold in pet shops in the UK , but bred by enthusiasts and people that use them to hunt rabbits. They do have polecat in their DNA. And escaped ones or lost during hunting can become feral and have been known to breed with wild polecats. I have kept ferrets for many years.

He is quite tiny. Pity I didn't get it closer! Thought it was a pheasant in the distance. Black specks on the path... then I thought it was a mink. It caught something (maybe a frog) and ran off with it. I waited a bit and was annoyed that the kitty came along. Luckily I didn't move on!! 🙂

..and very dangerous!

@@PR4U2NV Yes!

But deadly

@@kevinwarburton2938nah it couldn’t kill a cat especially not if that size. But it could cause some damage for sure. Thats why the cat knew better than to mistake it for easy prey lol

thats not a skunk. its a marten

The polecat had been up and down a few times- I think it was catching frogs and hiding them, but it was a bit far for me to see. When the cat came along, I thought the polecat would vanish, but it didn't. Must have been very busy. The cat seems to have heard something in the grass or undergrowth and being a cat it decided to wait. I think they were both surprised to see each other.

You have to watch the next episode to find out! That's how they keep you hooked!

😂😂😂😂 clearly you guys don’t know what a polecat is.. the polecat smells are 10 times worse than a skunk so he wasn’t afraid of the cat and the cat instinctively knew better

100% polecat. You can see its bandit mask. It was catching frogs and stashing them somewhere.

Haha haha hahahahaha hahahahaha

Wrong. It's a polecat. I guess you think a polecat is a skunk, which it isn't.

I'd ha e gone with mink also, it's very dark for a polecat, but if it has the mask your right it must be a polecat, never seen one so dark before

Skunks and Polecats are actually cousins, they're both in the muskelid family.

Full screen on a computer and you can see it has a bandit mask! So not mink! :-)

@@Ayniadkyes you are right I have zoomed in and can see a mask

It's a ferret cuz weasels are much smaller than ferrets

​@@itsroxannetime289no, a polecat is a polecat... ferrets are ferrets... two distinctly different species. European Polecats are wild animals and very good hunters, ferrets have two thousand years of domestication under their belt and don't survive long in the wild.

The difference between a weasel & a stoat is- weasels are weasely recognised, & stoats are stoately different😀

Polecats are a wild European species of Mustelid, meaning it’s part of the Weasel family. Ferrets are also descended from these guys.

My running gag in my house (I have cats and Ferrets) is the Ferrets think the cats are "short-eared, long-tailed rabbits".

NOBODY CARES AQUAMAN

Two totally different animals.

_We're not living in America_ _We're not sorry_ - The Sounds

Weasels (in Europe) are a different think to a polecat. In the UK of the smaller Mustelidae we have the Weasel, the Stoat, the Polecat and (much rarer) the Pine Martin plus invasive Mink. Tamed Polecats - Ferrets - are quite popular as pets and hunting partners.

The American polecat, also known as "black-footed ferret", would like a word with you. Silly colonials getting their words wrong again.

​@@ronhall9394 there are eurasian minks too. Not all of them are american.

​@@broadbandislifeactual species trees would like a word with you... Polecats and black footed Ferrets are two completely different species... they don't even look alike and are easily visually distinct from one another.

@@wolfshanze5980 "The black-footed ferret (Mustela nigripes), also known as the American polecat[2] or prairie dog hunter,[3] is a species of mustelid native to central North America. The black-footed ferret is roughly the size of a mink and is similar in appearance to the European polecat and the Asian steppe polecat. It is largely nocturnal and solitary, except when breeding or raising litters.[4][5] Up to 90% of its diet is composed of prairie dogs.[6][7] " - Wikipedia ...and looking at the photos on the site the three species mentioned indeed look quite similar. Not unrelated: derived from a common ancestor, the extinct _Mustela stromeri._ They even produce fertile hybrids, whereas unions with the somewhat more distantly related (and visually markedly more differing) European mink tend to result in sterile ones. The ferret is thought to be basically just a domesticated European polecat; mentions of the little guys go right back into Antiquity. "Polecat" is _also_ applied to a an entirely different subfamily of _Mustelidae,_ the _Ictonychinae,_ whose members are mostly found in Africa and South America. "It includes the grisons, Patagonian weasel, striped polecats, African striped weasel, and marbled polecat.[2][3] These genera were formerly included within a paraphyletic definition of the mustelid subfamily Mustelinae.[4]" ...you may note some fairly errant applications of "weasel" there too. Back in the day common names were given on basis of similarity of appearance etc.

Weasels can bite through bone and are far more agile. Either could kill the other, but honestly a weasel would probably come out on top simply due to agility.

@@jacobesterson You geniuses do know that cats hunt and eat weasels.

@@fyfyi6053 Yes, but weasels can and do fight off cats!

@@nightlightabcd Just like how rabbits sometimes fight off weasels.

Ummm... NO. Learn your animals... weasels are tiny, not much bigger than a mouse... polecats are much bigger than weasels by a Longshot. Clearly not a weasel to anyone who spent 30 seconds or more looking up members of the Mustelid family.

Well you thought wrong.

It is part of the Weasel so you’re right, and Ferrets are descended from these guys too.