We've had our weasels for about six months now.  We got Penny first, and
after about six weeks we knew that one ferret was not enough, so we got
Zoe.  Penny is grey, and has a tiny white spot over each eye, almost
like eyebrows, so she always has a somewhat quizzical expression.  Zoe is
brown, which makes it easy to tell them apart.
 
Zoe is more aggressive, and is usually the one who starts the chasing and
wrestling matches.  She's also a jumper; I've seen her jump over a foot in
the air to catch a toy or try to get onto a shelf where she shouldn't be.
Penny is more earthbound and moody.  If we're playing with her with a toy
and Zoe comes over to join in, Penny will walk away and lay flat on the
floor and "sulk" because she's not getting all the attention.
 
Penny also takes immediate possession of any squeeky toys we being home,
and makes sure they are always in their proper place in a corner of the
cage.  If we take them out and scatter them around the room, she runs
around frantically picking them up and racing back to the cage with them.
If we try to keep her away from the cage, she will secure the toys in the
other hidey houses we have for the ferrets.  Then at night, after we've
gone to bed, we hear some furtive squeeking as she retrieves them, and in
the morning they are all back in the cage again.
 
Zoe loves to play in mailing tubes (the kind for mailing posters).  She
will crawl into one, and Debbie and I will roll it back and forth between
us until Zoe finally staggers out, shakes herself to reorient herself, and
then scampers back into the tube for more.  Once she crawled into a tube
and I put another tube on the end.  She crawled into that one, so I moved
the first tube to the end of the second.  She kept running, and I kept
swapping the tubes; like the old cartoon where the train is running on two
sections of track, and the crew keeps picking up the track from behind and
moving it to the front.  We kept this up until I was laughing so hard that
I fell over, and Zoe just sat there looking at me from the end of a tube
as if to say "Is the game over already?"
 
Our favorite play activity is to spread an old towel on the floor between
Debbie and me.  The ferrets run into the middle of it, and then we pick
up the ends and start shaking and bouncing it around.  The weasels go
absolutely crazy, bouncing around, chattering, wrestling with each other,
and just generally acting silly.  If they try to run out, we flip the
edge of the towel up and try to keep them in; if they succeed in escaping,
they race around the room attacking everything in sight and then run back
into the towel.  Sometimes we throw a squeeky toy in with them so they
can fight over it.  We have no idea why they enjoy this so much, but they
have a great time and we love to watch them bounce around in the towel
like furry ping-pong balls.
 
The only problem we've had with our ferrets is that Debbie turned out to
be allergic to them.  If they licked her on the arms, she got a horrible
rash, and any contact near her face made her eyes extremely swollen.  We
love the ferrets too much to give them up at this point, so we were looking
everywhere for something to help.  Finally, we have found a couple of
things that seem to have gotten the problem under control.
 
The first is a product called "Seal Skin".  It's an aloe-based lotion that
seals the skin while still letting it breathe, and it seems to have helped
with the direct contact problem.  The other product is "Allergy Relief:
Animal Hair/Dander".  It's a liquid that is taken sub-lingually (under the
tongue).  Debbie uses it a couple of times a day, and it seems to really
work in preventing the rash and swelling.  It also works on my cat allergy.
The Allergy Relief product should be available in most health-food stores,
under the trade name "bioAllers".  We got the Seal Skin from a mail order
catalog; I can look up the info on it if anyone's interested (send me
private mail at [log in to unmask], and if there's enough interest I'll
post the info to FML).
 
Kurt and Debbie and Penny and Zoe
 
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Kurt G. Schumacher                                  Schumacher & Associates
[log in to unmask]                                 Boulder, CO
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[Posted in FML issue 0510]