The New York City Board of Health rejected a bid Tuesday to permit pet ferrets, citing fears that they pose a danger to unattended babies and that they could escape and overtake rundown properties.  The proposal was sought by animal activists and supported by the Department of Health and Mental Hygiene, which said it found insufficient evidence to show that the slinky mammals pose a public-health threat.  But the board aired concerns that ferrets could slink through wall openings or pipes to neighboring apartments and that escaped animals could multiply in abandoned buildings.  “I believe we were told of at least one instance of a ferret bite of an infant where the ferret had apparently crawled into the apartment through cracks in the walls or around the pipes,” board member Dr. Lynne Richardson explained before voting against the proposal.  The ferret ban dates to the administration of Mayor Rudy Giuliani.  Three board members voted Tuesday in favor of legalizing ferrets, two voted against, and four abstained. Six votes were needed for passage. Mr. de Blasio, who has been criticized for the sluggish pace of his appointment process, hasn’t filled two open positions on the panel.  The board members are appointed by the mayor, but several current members are holdovers from the Bloomberg administration.  Ferret fans weren’t pleased with the board’s action.  “I’m disgusted right now,” said ferret lover and activist Ariel Jasper, 24 years old, who initially petitioned the Health Department for the change. “Look at New Yorkers, scared of a 2-pound ferret.”  Under the proposal, ferret owners would have been required to have their pets vaccinated, sterilized and kept restrained when outdoors. But that wasn’t enough to sway the board.  “We had a conversation about feral ferrets beginning to inhabit the old, and in many ways debilitated, housing stock of New York City,” Dr. Richardson said. “I’m not at all convinced that it wouldn’t be a substantial public health risk to allow ferret ownership in New York City.”  Activists called those fears unfounded.  “Ferrets are slinky and so forth, but there’s no evidence of this mass escaping of ferrets in apartment buildings,” said activist David Gaines. “Tokyo has ferrets, Mexico City, Sao Paulo. There’s been no problem of ferret escapes.”  New York City is one of four major U.S. jurisdictions that prohibit pet ferrets, along with the District of Columbia and the states of California and Hawaii, said Dr. Dan Katz, who presented the amendment on behalf of the city’s health department.  He said ferrets appear to pose neither a nuisance nor a significant public health risk where they are legal. He said the agency didn’t believe New York City’s colder climate would allow for a feral ferret population.  The risk of injury, particularly to small children, was of greater concern to the city. The health department received four reports of ferret bites between 2008 and 2014.  “There are absolutely case reports of very serious, disfiguring injuries, and worse to young, unattended children,” Dr. Katz said. But, he added, such instances are rare and “bites with major consequences were almost always to infants, and almost always to infants unattended.”
Four members of the city’s Board of Health abstained from voting on a measure to legalize ferrets as pets.