Dear Ferret Folks-
As people who got their first ferrets with no useful ferret
info./background whatsoever, it seemed that every new "game" was a
first-ever, unique ferret event. It wasn't until I joined the FML that
I learned otherwise, but that didn't make each new 'game' discovery
in my home less hilarious at the time of discovery! (Or sometimes
intensely irritating, terrifying...you get the idea. It varies from
game to game.)
Our 'discovery' of Daleking was something I will never forget. We first
saw it with Switch the Kit, who liked to eat the dog's, the Noble Allis
Chomper's dog food right out of the bowl. Poor Alice. She has suffered
so many ferret indignities over the years. She has lived ten of her
eleven years with ferrets, and she has stories to tell I am sure, if
only those paws could type.
It was a big yellow plastic bowl that we kept filled with dog kibble.
It rested on the lineloleum floor of the kitchen, tucked away into a
corner. Switch used to waddle over to it (she was a husky girl) and
graze. She would stand on her back feet, and her top half would
basically hang over the edge of the bowl. Her belly would flatten out
over the rim of the bowl, and all you could see of her was something
that looked like a gray furry eggplant with two little feet on the
bottom. There were crunching sounds. Allis would watch, in canine
agony, mooing softly to herself every few minutes. (Oh, the horror...)
This arrangement worked fine as long as the bowl was full. Switch could
hang on the side like that. But then came the day that the bowl was
virtually empty, and she tried it. She stood up against it, draped
herself over the rim, and it promptly fell over on her and upside-down,
trapping her inside. So what did she do? Panic, of course. As only a
ferret can panic.
Picture this in your mind's eye. A huge cheap yellow plastic bowl,
about two feet across, upside-down on my kitchen floor zipping around
seemingly of its own accord. It would bounce off of the cabinets,
off of the base of the dish washer, bounce off of the bottom of
the refidgerator. The dog was barking madly. I run to see what is
happening, and I find this game of floor hockey happening with no
explanation. Switch is silent under there, running blindly as fast
as she can, and bouncing off of hard surfaces. Taking my life in my
hands (I have seen "Poltergeist", after all) I put one bare foot on
top of the bowl to stop it. It does stop, but there is a scrambling,
scratching, scrabbling noise inside. Something is thrashing under
there. I reach down and flip the bowl over....and there is Switch the
Kit. Staticed to within an inch of her life, totally poofed, her fur
mashed in fourteen different directions, panting. She didn't even make
eye contact, she just fled.
I figured we wouldn't be seeing any more of *that*, thank you. I
thought she had learned her lesson.
Silly me. I don't know when she decided that this had actually been
kind of fun, but evidently that was her take on the whole event. She
learned to burrow in the dog food when the level was low in the bowl so
that she could spill it onto the floor, and tip the bowl over. She did
it again. And again. And again over the short years of her life. (She
left us too soon, too soon.) The thing was she *always* had to be
rescued. She could not tip the bowl back off of herself. I never came
home from an outing and found her trapped under there. She knew enough
to only play this game when there were hoomins nearby to rescue her
when the fun was over.
It wasn't much fun for the dog, to see her food spilled all over the
kitchen floor while some, some *weasel* played bumper pool in the
middle of it. Oh, if Allis could type. The ferret game of "jump on the
dog's wagging tail", or "wait until the dog is asleep and run bodily
across and over her"....Ping's game of "Let's bite the dog's nose to
see what happens"...(that was a short game, played only once and then
abandoned!)
Alexandra in MA
[Posted in FML 5679]
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