On the subject of caged ferrets, I just thought I'd throw in what we do
with our gang.
 
We live in a very small, two-bedroom townhouse, about 900 square feet.
Also, we don't have bedrooms on the doors, and as you can see from my .sig
file, a lot of other animals around.  There are no doors on the bedroom
doors that lead to the living room, because of a landlord problem.  We used
to keep the ferrets caged in a good-sized, two level cage (when we just had
the three of them, anyway) when we were asleep or away from home and had the
run of the house teh rest of the time.  That ended up not working, because
not only did Coffee bang on the cage when she wanted out at night, she also
eventually figured out how to open the latches on teh cage one day when we
weren't home.  They also figured out how to open one of the gerbil cages,
and we had to hunt down the seven mangled bodies by following the blood
splashes and such.
 
Our next attempt was building them a small room inside our bedroom, with
four foot walls and a small gate.  This worked for a while, but got both
messy and hard to interact with the ferrets this way, so we gave that up
too.
 
The arrangement we have currently consists of baby-gates on both bedrooms.
The ferrets live entirely in our bedroom (aside from occassional dashes past
us into the living room -- it's a game for a few of them) and are not ever
cages.  This keeps them both away from the other animals, and with lots of
room to play.  Not to mention they enjoy snuggling into bed with us some
nights and mornings.
 
However, this arrangement is going to change shortly, also.  Since I'm
currently 21 weeks pregnant, we definately have another baby to take care of
on teh way.  We're planning on cleaning out the bedroom we use for storage
and gerbils right now, and having htat as the baby;s room, but there are two
snags with the ferrets.  The first is we want teh little one to sleep in our
room in a cradle with us for ease of night-time feedings and such.  The
second is to get to teh master bathroom with the tub, you have to go through
our bedroom/ferret room.  So, we're getting a large dog crate, and the
ferrets will stay in it at night and during bathtime.  At least as long as
we live here.  We're hoping to be able to buy a home next year, and maybe
rent a better one this year.  Although it's pretty difficult to rent a house
with the pets we have, to be sure.
 
Anyway, that's how we deal with it.  *shrug* Thought it might interest
folks.
 
Michelle
Flutist
 
--
Meet my pets.  The ferrets (Taz, Coffee, Daphne, Tia, Gretchen, and
Beelzebub), the gerbils (34 of them), the rats (seven of them), the budgies
(Sky and Cindy), the cockatiels (Snow and Spice), and the fish (various).
RIP Honey, Summer, Grendel, Peggie, Timmy and Racer.
[Posted in FML issue 1599]