Subject:                              Time:  10:55 AM
  OFFICE MEMO         Keeping your ferret/fan undented      Date:  11/21/94
Kristen,
 
   As a longtime fuzzy owner, I have had to try to figure all sorts of ways to
keep the fuzzies out of/off of/away from things that they ought not to be
in/on/eating/destroying.  The following methods are listed, complete with their
advantages/drawbacks.
 
   1.  Hired armed guard.  This worked beautifully for about a week.
Unfortunately, along with being expensive, the fuzzies started tactical
maneuvers, misdirecting him with squeaky toys while others did an end-around
straight to the potted plants.
         Shortly thereafter, they began frontal attacks.  They took his gun, his
baton, his cuffs (which they liked to play with), and, of course, they took his
socks.  He left later that day, a beaten man.  The last we heard he had taken a
job guarding very old people in a rest home.
 
2.  Get a cat.  We acquired Petey, The One-Eyed Cat, and hoped that Petey (a
girl) would solve the problem.
     We found Petey the next morning, trussed up in the middle of the kitchen
floor like a calf at a rodeo, three legs tied up in the air and the rope knotted
with a flourish.  The plants, once again, were goners.  We put the usual yellow
crime-scene ribbon around the incident of the foul, and gamely plodded ahead.
Petey was flown to Kittytrauma, and is recovering.
 
3.  Install large Plexiglass partitions, just like they have in many banks
today.  Problems:  cost prohibitive, installation difficult, makes use of house
problematic, probably ineffectual.  If it doesn't do much for some of the
desperate bank robbers, did anyone really think that it was going to stop a much
more determined (and better-equipped) creature?
 
4.  1x2 welded wire or hardware cloth, in combination with duct tape ("duck
tape" according to Garrison Keillor).  Cheap, relatively easy to install, allows
air to flow through (important in refrigerator applications), stops 'em cold.
Carefully placed around the tops of large potted plants, will frustrate even
determined ferrets.  The only major drawback is unavoidable:  being blocked off
from familiar haunts (or from things that they are used to being able to
destroy), they WILL find something else to ravage.  Make a serious push on crime
in the inner city, and it moves outward to the suburbs.  Ferret-trouble sort of
follows this giant amoeba theory; push in here, trouble pops out there.  BE
VIGILANT!  Get the whole neighborhood involved.  Ferret troublemaking is not a
localized problem.  Contact your Congressperson ("A what?  Never heard of it").
 
      Good luck with it, and all that.
 
      Stu, Carla, Wuzzy the Terror, Petey the One-Eyed Cat, Celia the Guinea Pig
("what do you mean, 'low order on the food chain' "?)
 
[Posted in FML issue 1021]