Finally--almost all our personal ferrets have their beautiful, soft,
amazingly plush winter coats.  Simon's lagging a bit behind the others (he
looks kind of like a stretched-out scraggly white rat right now), but every
time I touch Tesseract I'm amazed at how soft she is.  And Winter--in
summertime a skinny little brownish-gray girl--is back to being poofy and
silver and just generally living up to her name.
 
A lot of the shelters are still changing their coats; a good bath and
brushing seems to speed the process along by removing loose hair.  I
discovered another thing that removes loose hair, though--and that's nail
clipping.  Honest.  See, I often scruff my ferrets in my teeth when I clip
them--not always, just when there's no one else around and the fert doesn't
want to sit still (some of mine are so used to having their nails done they
just deal with it) and the ferretone trick isn't working.  Anyway, I often
end up having to scruff the shelter kids in my teeth, because a lot of them
have never had their nails done at all and they're totally freaked out by
the concept.
 
Never, ever, ever scruff a shedding ferret in your teeth.  I'm still
spitting out pieces of Farren.
 
And, on another note--our shelter is full of happy, healthy ferrets!  Come
read about them at our web site--and shelter mom me just got a cheap digital
camera, so maybe sometime soon we'll manage to put images up there--and if
you're in Maine and looking for a new fuzzy, let me know.  :-)
 
Jen and the Crazy Business
http://home.maine.rr.com/tesseract
[Posted in FML issue 2862]