Happy Birthday to my Houdini and Roxie!  Today is their third birthday
(brother and sister from the same litter)!!!  They are celebrating it by
sleeping the entire day.  My husband and I celebrated by driving an hour
up to "Otter Zentrum" which is a nature preserve/zoo dedicated to the
river otter and its weasel cousins here in northern Germany.
 
Besides the three otter habitats, there were two kinds of marders - pine
and beech (they can climb and jump like nothing I've ever seen!), little
tiny ermines, badgers, and of course, European polecats.  The guy doing
the feeding picked up the polecats while he was talking and I muttered
to Toby, "Wow, they don't even bite him!".  Turns out we were lied to :-)
Halfway through his speech, he admitted that what they had there on
display were not real polecats, but domestic ferrets.  Apparently, there
would be no way to contain a real polecat in a cage, even an electrified
one, it would always escape!  Plus they are endangered here, so I would
imagine that they are hard to come by.  But he swore that they were
exactly like the wild one, except that their brains were a little bit
smaller, hee hee...
 
Emily
[Posted in FML issue 4493]