Beckers--
        Sorry to hear that Escher isn't doing so well.  Do you have
the Duck Soup recipe that Ann & Howard Davis developed to save a fuzzy
that had given up?  Let me know if you don't find it, and I'll email
you a copy.
 
Matt--
        I think any organized way the ferret-loving community can
come up with to bombard the media into getting us the publicity we
need is an idea worthy of trying.  I know Rita McDowell has sent
mailings or made calls to several of these shows, and as yet nothing
has really happened.  All the crap that is cropping up in all these
different places is just outrageous, unfair persecution of pet
owners, and a huge waste of taxpayers' money and lawmakers' time.  All
for an animal that is a terrific pet, and in no way as dangerous on
any front as dogs and cats, which are readily accepted.  Surely if we
all kick and scream loud enough and long enough we have to get SOME
media coverage!  Everything my mother-in-law has seen on the news or
in papers in California is spouting negative garbage about how
ferrets are vicious biters, terribly dangerous to children, and a
threat in the form of quickly propagating wild colonies.  And they
make it convincing enough that she (a real animal lover) is beginning
to buy into it (boy, you should have heard the argument she and Scott
got into on the phone Sunday!)!  We had to talk her back to reality!
    I'm writing letters to Cobb County, the City of Atlanta, the city
of Marietta, Georgia Tourism, and anyone else I can think of that
might even take a minute to read.  Scott and I were planning a trip to
Georgia to visit relatives and were going to take at least one of our
fuzzies.  Now we either won't go, or we will plan our trip to avoid
the whole greater Atlanta area.  We will cancel any
recreation/entertainment plans we had there, because we cannot safely
take our pets into that area.  This will of course eliminate any need
for lodging and food we would have had.  And our shopping can be done
at Pigeon Forge, TN, just as easily-- it is sort of a tradition,
though we had thought we wouldn't have time for it.  Now that we
won't waste any days in Atlanta, though, we can go to Tennessee
instead! ;> !  I may not live there, but I'll make what little stink
I can!
 
      On the "what items do your ferrets steal" front, our guys will
pretty much steal anything.  Especially Thor.  One of our toilets
backed up a couple of weeks ago, and we had to purchase a plunger.
After clearing the initial clog, it was perched on the edge of the
tub until such time as we were convinced there would be no more
overflows.  The next day, Scott was off minding his own business,
doing whatever puttering around it is that men do when their wives
are at work, and he started hearing some kind of bumping noise
elsewhere in the apartment.  He made a quick tour, but the noise had
stopped, so he went back to what he was doing.  Later he walked into
the second bedroom (our computer room!) and found the plunger
laying in the floor near the bed.  Thinking it out of place, but not
finding it otherwise strange, he returned it to the tub next to the
toilet.  Sometime later the bumping sound began again and this time
lasted long enough for him to locate it--  He found Thor backing into
the second bedroom, tugging at the rubber end of the plunger!  He
backed right under the daybed, beneath the collapsed trundle unit that
slides under the daybed, and tried valiantly to tug this absolutely
huge plunger under the 1 1/2 inch clearance between the floor and the
trundle supports!  Scott said he was laughing so hard that he had a
difficult time taking the plunger away-- not to mention that when he
DID pick it up, up came a large ferret dangling from the the plunger
by his teeth!
 
             Debra in Ft. Worth, TX
 
Take your levity whenever and wherever you can find it.
 
[Posted in FML issue 0785]