I blame the subversive movies. You know the ones, those movies that
sneak in a tiny cute little furry creature into the plot and let the
creature steal your heart away. It may be a not-so-great movie but you
will watch it over and over and pause and replay the ferret bits. Tell
me that you haven't done that ?

For us, it was "The Beastmaster (1982)".

Just a flash of a tiny furry nose and we were smitten.

But hey, we had to meet each other and get married and buy a house
before we could consider getting one of our own. By that point in time,
my middle sister had "conned" (still don't know how she convinced the
parents who only ever let us have a goldfish) them into accepting a
ferret. So we had some contact with hers and she had found the one and
only expert ferret vet in the whole of our province. She found that a
local young breeder was due to have some new litters and introduced us
to her. When we went to visit to chose our first ferret, the breeder
asked if we would be interested in taking a small adult female that she
was unable to take on but had been left in her care. The real "first"
ferret, was so sweet and gentle that on the spot we accepted her. Panic
ensued as we were not expecting to take home any ferrets as the babies
were many weeks away from the optimum time for parental separation. But
scramble we did and got enough gear to house her and the new baby in
another month. Nickia (pronounced "Ni" - "keeeah" was an angel and made
us ferret parents quickly. She took on the mommy role over the second
ferret, Mocha when she was finally old enough to become ours.

We contacted my sister's ferret vet and took him on as our own and
between us, started on a long education on the care and feeding of
ferrets. There were so few of us during the later half of the 1980s
that it was hard to research and collect the information that we needed
to do the best for them. A tiny number of vets had even heard of a
ferret let alone knew what to do properly. Awesome thanks were due to
the vet who gave such expert care to all of our ferrets through their
lifetimes.

As part of reaching out and communicating what we were learning, my
husband and I decided that a moderated news group would be a safe way
to share good information between those who needed it. The news groups
without moderation were too full of trolls and nasty people and
filtering was needed to protect new ferret owners from bad and horrible
information that was being spread around.

And so the FML came to be. Chris Lewis, my husband ran it for 7 years
while I handled work that we also did for our local environmental
group. Bill took it over from Chris when changes in his work
responsibilities demanded a shift in priorities. Many thanks to Bill
for his many years keeping the FML going. We feel great that our
efforts environmentally saved a large portion of land into a federally
protected park within a large urban city and that the creative idea for
the newsletter has lived for more than 25 years fulfilling the mandate
and dream that it was originally created under.

We are sadly unable to keep ferrets as the newest member of our family,
our soon-to-be daughter-in-law is severely allergic to cats and
ferrets, though she tried really hard with ferrets. But our legacy
lives on in the ferret vanity car licence plates that we still use,
battered and old though it is and every computer that has ever been in
our house has been named after an animal belonging to the Mustelids
family. Our rural property is home to number of the wild ones, such as
weasels, fishers, otters, minks and skunks/American polecats and so we
are treated to sights of them frequently to feed our ferret cravings.
And yes, myself and our son are still members of the FML.

Sincerely,
Patricia Paley and Chris Lewis

[Posted in FML 8174]