Belle, our 2.5 year old sable, got a new coat over about three weeks last
month. It seemed a strange time to change coats, especially since it's her
first complete coat change since she was a kit.
 
She shed copious amounts of soft white undercoat, as well as the long dark
guard hairs. She lost the guard hairs from her sides first, leaving her with
a mohawk style hairdo, and looking VERY narrow. She also developed a white
ring around the base of her tail, as the guard hairs that normally cover it
were lost. Her tail did not shed noticeably.
 
She is now pretty much grown back, just the same as before, with the addition
of some white guard hairs on the hindquarters. Makes her look old and
grizzled beyond her years.
 
She HATES the snow and cold. We took her out a couple times, but she just
high-tails (bottle-brush tails?) it back to the house, or sits shivering
pathetically hunched by our boots. I relented quickly and put her inside my
jacket, where she dug about for a bit, then climbed halfway down the sleeve.
 
On another matter, I am amazed by other people's stories of how their fuzzies
steal socks. Belle goes for the hard stuff: shoes. She is especially fond of
my daughter's sneakers, and Joy frequently is running about the house looking
for her shoes before the school bus comes. Copious applications of Bitter
Apple have reduced the damage and disappearance rate, but once Belle dragged
my husband's shoe all the way up the stairs. That shoe probably weighed twice
what Belle weighs!
 
And finally, my husband Richard has recently developed a fondness for root
crops such as rutabagas and turnips, which is shared by Belle. Richard thinks
this is because Belle's wild ancestors spent a lot of time digging around in
tunnels, and sampling the roots they ran into there. Thus ferrets are not
really carnivores, but are omnivorous. I think this is ridiculous: after all
ferrets presumably never ran into grapevines in the wild, but they are
inordinately fond of raisins. (Somewhere in this there is a story of how wild
ferrets were first domesticated in the vineyards of Greece 3000 years ago,
and the REAL reason California is afraid of them... :-)) Anyway, Richard
asked me to ask if anyone else's fuzzies like root crops.
 
Linda, Richard, Joy and Belle
[Posted in FML issue 1098]