'Ello, back from London finally and done with all the FMLs and other sundry
email received during the past week.  Here are my thoughts on a bunch of
things...
 
Caging: I keep my caged at night and loose when I'm away during the day.
Sometimes they're caged from the time I get home through the evening,
excepting a short while when I take them out to play.  The room they're
confined to is regularly checked for breaches in the ferret-proofedness
that's been established there, and it's a testament to the ferrets'
intelligence and stubborness that breaches are found, not any fault of skill
at ferret-proofing of mine.  Read that again: ferrets are more cunning than
we are, and more easily bored.  Whatever your preferred method, and I've
found they all work fine for me EXCEPT caging more than 20 hours a day, make
sure you regularly go over the room as though you were ferret-proofing it
for the first time.  Personally, I don't leave my ferrets out all the time
because they are better about using the litter box reliably when they're out
if they're left in their cage more.
 
Polecats: When in London, I looked up some British mammal info and found out
that the European polecat looks just like our plain ol sable ferts.  The
steppe polecat kinda does too, while the spotted polecat is really like the
leopard of the black-footed-ferret world.  I didn't get to do the research i
wanted to, but I did see plenty of stuffed polecats in the Natural History
museum and I did get a polecat postcard which I will be scanning in and
posting to my web page forthwith.  Pretty keen.  Looks *just* like a ferret.
I keep suspecting that they just used ferrets for the stuffed polecats and
polecat pictures I saw, since if presented with a late-neuter male and a
polecat I wouldn't be able to tell the difference between the two....
 
Cheers,
Melissa
 
 ___ Melissa Litwicki __ [log in to unmask] ___
 By the whole newsgroup devoted tennis showing
     it after scarfing fork and laughters
[Posted in FML issue 1945]