They’re still glad an ocean separates them from the honey badgers
Yes, it’s the largest mustelid. Ernest Thompson Seton on the comparison:
The only member of the family that people usually think of pleasantly is the otter - otherwise, we have weasels, ferrets (aka polecats), stoats, ermines, minks, fishers, martens, badgers, wolverines … what a family … well, a couple of 'em have nice fur, and badgers can be anthropomorphised into gruff but good guy characters in children’s literature sometimes.
I CANNOT BELIEVE THAT J.K. ROWLING MISSED TAKING ADVANTAGE OF THIS. 
Well, Walter Wangerin picked up on it in The Book of the Dun Cow, the only beast epic or children’s story I can think of offhand with a weasel as a positive character rather than a villain. The 2003 date on that link is a reprinting, BTW. First publication was 1978.
No mention yet of stoats.
See #22. BTW, ermine is another name for a stoat, often particularly for the animal in its winter phase with a white coat, so I was being redundant.
What, the mustelid that rapes baby seals to death* and then keeps the corpse around for days for necrophiliac purposes? Those otters? Not so pleasantly, no.
Freshwater otters seem to be OK, though … as far as we know :dubious:
*While drowning during the rape is a frequent cause of death the physical injuries sustained are also pretty horrific (and very similar to some traumas I’ve only read about in the context of wartime gangrape)
Thank you for admitting your redundancy instead of trying to stoat your way out of it.
Dayum. I bow to the weasel king.
Ferrets are useful too:
Also I recall Antony Armstrong detailing collecting a weasel for this in one or more of his fairy tales for grown-ups — not very sweet, and with the oddest type of Dunsanyesque illustrations — prolly in Punch of the 1920s or '30s, from The Prince Who Hiccupped.
Not having a copy near nor remembering his name, I had to google.
I think there was some mix-up between a Basilisk and a Cockatrice, hatched from an egg.
And off course, one of the more recondite pleasures of the rural class is to shove a ferret down a trouser-leg, to test one’s endurance.
I really don’t think a weasel is interchangeable in this case.
Alas, not everyone holds ferrets in such high regard:
But he stuffs the ferrets into his pants for fun and profit, so I don’t know if he’s giving the critters a proper opportunity to be anything other then ill-tempered and sullen.
ETA: ever-so-slightly ninja’d by Claverhouse
So it isn’t just talk talk talk?
Sorry.
Hey, get your own tagline…
Wouldn’t that depend on the size of the pants worn? I can think of a few young gadabouts who could stand to have a weasel stuffed in their pants…
Various sources disagree. Not all of them treat them as separate critters. Wangerin uses both terms in his book, for different threats to Chauntecleer’s kingdom. He actually uses “Cockatrice” as a proper name for the one cockatrice in the story. An army of “basilisks” are the offspring of Cockatrice. Given the uncertainty of the fables in the first place, Wangerin is probably in bounds for a fantasy novel. His weasel character is “John Wesley Weasel”.