Many of you remember the 1998 rescue we did of 30-odd ferrets from a bad
place.  I posted back then that I had stepped into hell when I stepped
onto the farm.  Boy was I wrong.  Today, I TRULY saw what hell was like.
 
The back-yard breeding farm was like many I had seen in the past except
this was on a residential property.
 
Old, rusted cages, poop everywhere and that smell....putrid smell of
rotting ferret crap and urine.  The ground of the little shed where
they were kept was cracking under my feet.  The floor rusted worse than
the cages themselves.  Nothing too shocking for me, I had seen this all
before.
 
The i spotted what I *thought* was an ailing ferret laying on its side.
I couldn't see too well, it was being covered by two other ferrets
cuddled on top of it.  As I inched my way towards the cage, horror and
vomit rose in the pit of my stomach.  These two little ferrets were so
starved, they had eaten their cage-mate.  This little dead ferret was
just skin, spine and a little hair.  In fact, I pulled out 3 dead, eaten
bodies from their cage and one ferret skull, eaten totally to the bone.
 
In other cages, we found a total of eight other skulls, eaten to the
bone.  We worked to get the ferrets out of there faster when we over
heard that another group of people were on their way to BUY a pair of
breeding ferrets.  We didn't give them that chance.
 
I was then taken to a barn, off the property at a farm to pick up the
last 4 ferrets.  In this barn were 5 Shetland Ponies.  NONE of them had
ever had their hooves clipped and one was in such pain, she couldn't
stand on her own.  She used the wall of the barn to hold her body up.  I
called the SPCA about the horses and someone will be going out tomorrow.
 
Before we arrived at the home to get the ferrets, 4 others were given to
someone else.  In total, we have 29 alive, 11 were found dead, eaten by
other ferrets AND a bucket FULL of dead ferret fur.
 
Now, that's a true taste of Hell.
 
Randy Melanie Belair
President
The Ferret Aid Society "For the Love of our Fuzzy Friends"
<http://www.ferretaid.org/>
[Posted in FML issue 4724]