I've had six ferrets at a time. Whoever coined "barrel of monkeys" never met a business of ferrets: a swirling ball of play, character, and mischief looking for trouble. They'll steal anything not tied down and hide it under the couch usually. Their favorite toy is a length of dryer exhaust hose: they spend hours running through and ambushing whoever comes out the end.
The Chappel Beer Festival, which is a beer festival in Chappel, Essex, is for some reason associated with a local ferret welfare charity, who turn up and run fundraising ferret events. There is a ferret tombola, where a ferret is put into a hexagonal hutch with pipes leading out of each side, and you bet on which one it will come out of, and ferret racing, where ferrets do two laps of a length corrugated pipe, and again, you bet on which will do it fastest:<p><a href="https://thehalfpintgentleman.files.wordpress.com/2013/09/dsc_3199.jpg" rel="nofollow">https://thehalfpintgentleman.files.wordpress.com/2013/09/dsc...</a><p>It's remarkably entertaining, although of course having money riding on it always heightens the thrill.
My first thought was must be Yorkshire - wasnt disappointed -<p>"Robert Sheldon, a British engineer who’d been brought on to NAL to find “shortcuts and money-saving ideas,” suggested a ferret, equipped with a cleaning tool, could do the job, scampering through the vacuum tubes as if flushing rabbits out of a warren. “In his part of Yorkshire, hunters used ferrets,”"
I suspect particle physicists and petroleum engineers didn't share much knowledge, otherwise they may have used <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pigging" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pigging</a> instead.<p>(That article contains a photo with an interesting caption when taken out of context: "Inserting a pig into a natural gas pipeline".)
Ferrets absolutely love running through tight tunnels!<p>I’ve heard stories (maybe apocryphal?) that ferrets are/were used to run pull cord in long underground fiber conduit runs.
Animals in hard science -- that reminds me of the "Always Mount a Scratch Monkey" story: <a href="https://edp.org/monkey.htm" rel="nofollow">https://edp.org/monkey.htm</a> (it did NOT end well).
They could have used a string with a tiny piece of metal at the front, and simply "accelerated" it through the conduct. Slower than a proton though :). I wonder if they could activate each of the magnets independently.