The story yesterday about the ferret encountering neighbor dogs reminded me
of this experience I had last year with my ferret Zooey, who is an absolute
HATER of dogs.  Once last year she got out of my apartment, which had a
cute little fenced yard attached to it.  I didn't notice she was out until
a couple minutes had past, at which time she was no longer in our yard.  I
ran around squeaking her favorite toy, but no Zooey.  I heard a commotion
in the neighbor's yard and went to investigate...there I found the
neighbor's dog, a 60 lb-odd grey mutt of some sort, perfectly friendly,
running around and around and around in circles being chased by...a 2 lb
ferret.  In retrospect the scene was sort of funny but at the time quite
scary, for the dog had this look on its face that was slowly changing
from confusion to annoyance.  I managed to get Zooey's attention with the
squeaky alligator and got her to run back under the fence to her own yard.
No one lost any hair or body parts, everything turned out okay, though the
dog's owner came out just after I had gotten Zooey over to her yard.  He
had heard the squeaking commotion and wanted to know what was going on...I
showed him the ferret and explained she had just finished terrorizing his
dog.  He didn't look like he believed it, but I didn't want to prove it to
him either so we went our separate ways, so to speak.  Needless to say
those two animals have not encountered each other since (and Zooey has not
encountered another dog.  She is quite happy with that).
[Posted in FML issue 2850]