“The King of the Ferret Leggers: What Kind of Person Sticks a Ferret down His Pants for More Than Five Consecutive Hours? Our Writer Tried to Find Out”, Donald Katz1983-02-01 (exercise, sociology)⁠:

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.”

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, 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. From a dark and obscure past, the sport has made an astonishing comeback in the past 15 years. When I first heard about ferret legging, the world record stood at 40 painful seconds of “keepin’ ’em down”, as they say in ferret-legging circles. A few years later the dreaded one-minute mark was finally 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 middle 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.”

…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 10 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.