A sport more likely to emphasize the agony of defeat rather than the thrill of victory is ferret-legging, which originated in England but has now also taken hold in parts of Virginia and Manitoba. In ferret-legging, a male contestant dons trousers without underwear and drops in two ferrets (although some more liberal non-traditional competitions now allow just one animal). The rules require that the ferrets must be able to travel from one leg to the other inside the britches but that the waist and cuffs of the trousers must be sealed so that the ferrets cannot escape. The ferrets cannot be sedated and must have their full set of teeth and claws. The winner of the contest is the person who goes the longest without releasing the ferrets.
The natural reaction of a confined ferret is to bite tenaciously and claw viciously anything (and I mean anything--remember, there is no underwear) it encounters, so the duration of the contests was originally fairly short and was generally measured in seconds and not minutes. However, the current record now stands at five hours and thirty minutes--still short of the magic time of six hours, which is the equivalent of the four-minute mile in the sport of ferret-legging. One world champion, Reg Mellor, wore white trousers so that all of the bleeding wounds were clearly visible. According to Outside Magazine, he described ferrets as "things that live only to kill, that'll eat your eyes out to get at your brain."
Ferret-legging was parodied in the Cape Feare episode of The Simpsons, except that the contestants used squirrels instead. Parenthetically, for reasons too many to enumerate here, Cape Feare was and is clearly the best episode of The Simpsons ever.
I agree with your Simpsons episode rating.
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