Stretch noises: Just as some of us feel so good that we make noise
stretching so do some ferrets.  Have you tried teaching them to yawn
or stretch on command?  They will.  Just put a ferret on lap and a
hand under each end while it awakes, then move hands apart and say
'stretch' each time till ferret does it for just the word any old
time.  Also use their own behavior to teach yawning on command (for
some reason this one is harder).
 
'Face Washing' as opposed to mouth pawing': Mouth pawing is actually
focused on the mouth, but there is another behavior which ferrets use to
spread the scent from glands near their ears which may involve: 1.
holding nose to force a sneeze (which forces more scent from the glands,
and is why it is so easy to teach a ferret to use a hanky) or wetting
paws with tongue, or neither of the two preceding motions, and always
includes 2.  putting hands on or behind ears and dragging them forward to
get all that magnificent 'Here's who I am' smell spread around.  (BTW, If
a ferret lacks scent (some just do while others lose it, or have it
change, or even have it increase with some illnesses) and is having
social problems because of that, perfume on the bottom and on the back of
the neck can come in handy.) Ferrets might also mouth paw if a piece of
food gets stuck in the palate.  Fritter constantly had that problem.  We
finally taught her how to hook the offender with her own toes/fingers to
flip it out.
 
She was an ace marksman, but then she also liked to steal plastic bottle
caps (as does someone else's little one on the list now) and would seal
the deed by carefully moving her bowels into it, with nary a smear
outside, except for the one dot she always left to clean her bottom --
being too dainty to drag like the others.  Our only other marksmen are
not chamber-pot kids, but bombadeers who like to wait for a moving target
before dropping items upon it.  (The original way they killed cattle, of
course!  No wonder the ferret helicopter and Warp are so talented.)
 
BTW, the prevailing current tendency among mammalian taxonomists is to
give the greater (not the lesser which is a clear procyonid) panda its
own family.  Whether one finds it mentioned with ursidae or procyonids
(as in racoons, kinkajoos, coatis, etc.) depends on who is being read.
It's so between that it really rates its own family to settle the dust.
 
                        Sukie
[Posted in FML issue 1218]