Someone wrote in a few days ago requesting stories of how people's ferrets
got their names.  I hope more people will write in with their name stories;
it'll be a nice break from the whole ferret magazine controversy.
*gentle smile*
 
My daughter and I debated over what to name our first ferret before we even
acquired one.  When we finally bought the dark sable male, Bronwyn wanted
to call him Bandit, but I wanted something a bit less generic (no offense
to those of you who are owned by Bandits! *g*).  In the end, we compromised
on Zorro.  It fit, being the name of a masked bandit, but had a bit more
flair.  And Zorro is a very debonair ferret, so I think we made the perfect
name choice.
 
Our second, a butterscotch/light chocolate girl, was a bit nippy as a kit,
and that was what eventually earned her her name.  She nipped my daughter
the first time she picked her up, then she nipped me the first time I held
her.  And she continued to nip one or the other of us all the way home.
Her other distinguishing characteristic was her beauty.  You know how some
animals are either so handsome or so beautiful that you don't have to
question whether they're male or female?  This little beauty is undoubtedly
a girl.  And so we decided to name her after another exquisitely beautiful
little girl with a penchant for biting...the little girl in _Interview with
the Vampire_.  And that's how Claudia got her name.
 
Our third, a male a shade or two darker than Claudia, took a couple of
days to name.  In fact, we "tried on" several names that really didn't fit
before we finally settled on one.  One thing that was obvious from the
start, though, was that this boy was full of mischief.  We received him as
a Christmas gift from my dad and stepmom, so he spent his first night with
us at my grandmother's house, where he proceeded to wreak as much havoc as
he could!  *g* It finally became apparent to us that he needed a name to
reflect his mischievous nature, and so we finally settled on Loki, after
the Norse god of mischief.
 
Loki has grown to be a large ferret, but our fourth, an albino male, was
huge even as a kit.  He's just this big, lumbering, loveable lunk who loves
to be silly.  He was another that we had a hard time deciding on a name for
at first.  I had originally decided I wanted to call him Krycek, after the
X-Files character, but with his personality, that name was all wrong.  So I
decided to try a name that reflected how big he was.  The first thing that
occurred to me was Andre the Giant, but he just didn't look like an Andre.
Soooo...I suddenly thought of the character that Andre the Giant played in
the movie, _The Princess Bride_, and I knew I had to call this boy Fezzik.
 
The final (for now!  *lol*) member of our fuzzy family was not ours
originally, but was given to us by a friend I met online in a fantasy
roleplaying chatroom.  She and I talked a lot about our ferrets while
online, and when her parents decided to move out of state (she's a college
student living in a no-pets-allowed dorm) and couldn't take Crysin with
them, she wanted to find him a good home.  None of her friends who had
their own place were ferret-knowledgeable, so she asked me if I would be
interested in taking him.  Since she lives in Tennessee and I have an aunt
who lives in Nashville, it worked out perfectly, since I was stopping at my
aunt's on my way back to school over the Christmas break.  She had named
her ferret Crysin, after the character who was her character's husband in
our roleplaying room, and we decided not to change his name.
 
And that is how each of our ferrets was named.
 
Dooks,
Lisa
Mom of Zorro, Claudia, Loki, Fezzik, and Crysin
@}-}-- ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ --{-{@
 
"A lost cause beats a sure thing
even when the deck's been stacked."
                 --Kevn Kinney
[Posted in FML issue 2644]