Betty wrote:
>When my hubby and I first got together, we were opposing in our beliefs in
>terms of what kind of family non-human companion we would like to bring
>into our home.
 
I thought that folks might like to know how Steve and I first wound up
with ferrets around 20 years ago.  Our's is a relationship where we are
best friends in addition to being in love and in which we each tend to
place the other person first -- it just flows like that because the
greatest happiness is from keeping the other happy and safe.  Can you
guess now how we got our first ferret?  Yep!  He thought that I wanted a
ferret and I thought that he wanted one!  Granted, we should have talked
about it more, but our hearts were in the right place and those same
hearts were rewarded when we both fell in love with ferrets.
 
There's been a lot of discussion on economics and ferrets.  The
problem isn't really with an economic class, though.  It's with money
distribution.  When people don't have cash then the best thing is think
outside the box (like when i was putting myself through college so could
barely -- and sometimes not really given that I had malnutrition more
than once then -- feed myself while paying for tuition, texts, and a
roof over my head).  Here are two solutions:
1. to help with someone else's animals (which is what i did then) or
2. to work out a fostering agreement with a shelter.
 
In a fostering agreement -- which has the best of two worlds -- the
person can have a critter but the shelter covers the medical costs, while
the fostering person covers day-to-day costs and day-to-day chores.  These
help everyone as a result.  We have 6 ferrets; 7 till recently.  Because
our economic situation is changing in a downward direction due the Labs
being dissolved and because we are under stress from having had had two
recent deaths in our human family, one in our ferret family, and a
near-death in our human family (all separate and within less than 6 weeks
of each other) we aren't adopting right now.  So far this year we have had
$1,706 in ferret costs with most of that being medical and last year we
had around $11,500 in ferret medical costs because the ferrets are all
but one in age groups prone to medical problems.  That should give an
idea of the financial responsibilities people have to be ready for.
Our area is expensive; so halve that for much less expensive locations.
Thank goodness for budget books; they keep us solvent and have provided
an economic cushion.  Some pains-in-the-butt (like budget books) just are
more than worth the nuisance of keeping them.
 
I know those paragraphs are a touch confusing.  Am very rushed for time,
so, please, just re-read them if confused.
[Posted in FML issue 3714]