Hi all--
I have two other tricks to convince a ferret who's holding on hard to let
go.  One is to grab their upper or lower jaw with your other fingers-- the
situation changes from the ferret biting you to you holding the ferret's
face.  Both of mine, even Cully monster, hate this and usually let go,
especially if you give their head a small shake.  The other thing that I do
is similar to the pinching the jaw trick, but while pinching the sides of
the jaw I'll also try to get some of the ferret's lips between its own
teeth.  They don't like to bite themselves :) so they let go.  Maybe it's
over optimistic on my part, but I think this trick has also helped to teach
Cully how much his bites hurt.  Physical punishment does not work for my
two, and I'm pretty much philosophically oposed to it anyway, but making the
ferret bite itself is a way of turning its strength against it.
 
BTW, here's a refreshing note about a big breeder, Hagen: I was just going
through some old papers and found the two page long ferret "instructions"
that came with the Hagen cage kit I purchased way back when.  In the
discipline section, it advised ferret owners to never hit their ferrets,
because physical punishment is meaningless to a ferret.  They advise a loud
no or time out when a ferret is misbehaving.  I hope that the people who buy
these cages read that and take it to heart-- seems to me that as far as
ferrets biting is concerned, an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of
cure.  Now, if Hagen would stop pushing wood chips with their cage kits...
 
Regina
and Cully and Amelia too (mom's still working on putting us on her web
page-- maybe by tommorrow we'll be out there in cyberspace!)
 
*********************************************
Regina Harrison
[Posted in FML issue 1765]