Hi folks-

Just catching up on the last few days...the big ferrets posts are
interesting. Big ferrets! Woah! Are they ever!! The ferrets we've been
seeing in the pet stores in Massachusetts have been a bit on the...
what's the word?...GIGANTIC side. My friend, a former rescuer, got two
unwanted ferrets from a local pet store who are also horrific biters,
probably because they have been in the pet store for 4-6 months and
have decided that humans do not rock. These two boys are about 5-6
months old and they are GINORMOUS. Big, massive shoulders and heads,
paws that they still need to grow into, and long, long tails. I spoke
to a woman who wants to get rid of her pair of ferrets (boyfriend
bought 'em, moved out, etc...you know the story, right?) and her male,
Tank, is a tank. A giant of a boy. They seem to be Marshalls, across
the board, I don't know about other areas. Maybe the commercial
breeders are trying to do us a favor and breed 'em bigger so that at
least when we have to drag them into the vet for the inevitable adrenal
surgery, those pesky little glands are proportionately bigger and
easier to see?

Off the big ferret topic: In the past 6 months my friend has had to go
get 3 ferrets from our local store who were biting so badly that the
store couldn't sell them to anyone. In the case of the first one, a
little girl, the employees reported that she didn't start biting until
after her cagemate, whom she loved, was sold and she was left behind
(across from a large cage of twittering parakeets, I might add; make
any kind of high-pitched birdie sound within earshot of her and she
goes apes-t). The other two boys also got meaner and bitier after their
last few cagemates were sold off. I wonder how common that is, for the
"ferret remainder" in the sale tank, as it were, to turn to biting?

-Heather M.

[Posted in FML 5510]