Hi all--
Since the subject of biters has come up a lot recently, and since as of this
weekend Cully will have been with me for one year, I thought I'd let him
tell you his story...
 
i am cully.  i am a big strong ferret with a big belly and a long tail and
big strong feets.  i've lived with mom and amelia for a year.  before that
my life was confusing.  i don't even remember where i came from.  i don't
have any tattoos like mom and amelia do, i guess i came from quebec or maybe
new york.  i lived with a person who called me kramer.  i stayed in my cage
a lot.  i tried to play with that person just like i kinda remembered
playing some other things-- maybe they were other ferrets, but i don't
remember at all.  that person hit me!  and yelled!  so i got scared.  i
tried to show her that everything was ok by asking her to play some more but
she put me back in the cage.  i didn't get to come out very much.  when i
did i'd try to get people to play with me but they always reacted the same.
so i started to think that maybe all the people are mean, and don't like to
play.  so if they hit me i bit them back harder, and if i got the chance i'd
bite them before they could hit me.  nobody ever picked me up and cuddled
me.  i would've bit them if they tried by then.  i didn't trust them, and
they didn't trust me.  i lived for about three years like this.  i didn't
get to come out to play much, and i didn't have any toys.  i could play with
my blankets though, i wrestled with them.  i didn't eat very good food, i
know i would have been a bigger ferret if i'd eaten good food.  like i said,
i have big feets.  suddenly one day a person took me out of my cage and put
me into a plastic box with holes in it.  she took me to a place that smelled
funny and had lots of screechy birds.  the person left and some other people
poked me hard!  with sharp things!  i tried to bite them but they were
smarter than the other people and stopped me.  then they put me in a cage in
a room full of the birds, and some animal with long ears that i wanted to
look at closer, i think it would have been nice to bite.
 
i stayed in that bird place for more than a week.  i heard the people there
say that my phone number didn't check out, and that the person who left me
there wasn't going to come back.  after a while they gave me to a woman
whose ferret had just died.  she fed me good food that i liked a lot but she
gave me baths too.  i didn't like that at all.  she understood that i wanted
to play when i asked her-- i never gave up asking.  she talked to me a lot
and i started to understand some things.  but she would go away every
weekend to a place with a big dog.  i'm scared of big dogs.  and little
dogs.  and in between sized dogs.  her roommate was very scared of me but
boy were her feet fun to chase!  i'd chase them and she'd run around
screaming and it was ever so exciting and it made me bite harder until the
roommate said no more ferret!  and the nice woman knew that she couldn't
give me enough time to play with anyway.
 
then my mom came one day.  she petted me and i curled up around her hand and
bit it a lot, pretty hard but not too hard.  i can handle this amount of
biting, she said.  she went away and then came back with some strange animal
that she called amelia.  i didn't know what it was, but it chased me all
over the place.  i get scared when i get chased.  mom said she would take me
home, because she thought that the fact that i wasn't biting the amelia was
a good sign.  i went to a new place with her and the amelia and some guy.
it was a big place and fun to explore, except that the amelia kept chasing
me.  everything scared me then.  i bit mom and the guy, and a few days later
when amelia trapped me in a box, i bit her too, really hard on the foot.
everybody was upset but mom remembered to comfort me because i was scared
too.  after that i knew that i was stronger than amelia, and she was scared
of me, so i bullied her a lot.
 
i learned many things.  one was that mom never hit me.  i tried biting her
hard to see what she'd do, and she grabbed my neck like i remember some
other mom doing sometime and talked to me.  i didn't want to listen, but i
did learn my new name pretty quickly.  mom says cully is a short name for
chuchullain.  that would have been a long name for me to learn.  i didn't
have to go in my cage too much, but i learned that if i bit anybody too
much, i'd have to go in my cage until i calmed down, or at least looked
calm.  and at the same time, people started to play with me!  at first, i
still got scared.  i couldn't believe that they really meant it, and weren't
just playing some trick.  i started to learn that i could trust people, but
i still felt like i had to bite them to test them.  if a person just let me
bite them without telling me to stop, then i'd know that i was the boss and
could push them around.  i kept testing with all people, all the time.  once
i bit mom so hard she had a bruise on her leg for a week.  i was mad because
she took me out of some dirt i was digging.
 
now i live with just mom and amelia.  i don't bite mom very much any more,
although sometimes i have to, just to check that she's still my mom and
won't hit me or anything.  i know that i still sometimes frustrate her a
lot, especially since i still bully amelia, though sometimes amelia starts
it.  and i bite mom's roommates and friends too much, especially male
people.  it's just that i can't trust anybody til they've shown me a whole
lot of times that i can trust them.  like i said, i still bite even mom.
but sometimes i curl up near her to sleep, and i like her to pet me now, and
i always give kisses.  just a couple of months ago i figured out how to play
with a ball.  i used to be scared of it when it rolled across the floor at
me but now i know what a toy is.  sometimes i feel like there's a short
circuit in my head, because i'm never going to be a relaxed calm ferret, but
i know that i have a happy home now, and that nobody's going to hit me
anymore, and that i can run around and play.  i'm almost five now but i act
much younger because i'm so happy to have the life that i have today.  gotta
go jump around now!
 
 
And now a word from mom-- as you may have gathered from Cully's account,
sometimes these biters can take a lo-o-o-ong time, especially if you weren't
really prepared for how stressful it can be dealing with them.  Once I had
Cully, there was no way I could let him go, because I knew that he needed an
understanding home, but it has been a tough road with him.  At this point I
really love him for his own sake-- he's not a charity case any more, I
wouldn't give him up for the world.  But it took us a long time to get to
the point where we trust each other, and there's still room for improvement
on both sides (he and Amelia may never be friends, but they've negotiated a
co-existence).  The absolute key, as others have said, is never to hit most
ferrets like Cully.  They need to be able to trust you before the bad
behavior can be expected to stop.  But when they do finally give that trust,
it's one of the most rewarding feelings I've ever felt =-)
 
Dooks all around,
Regina (y'know, Cully, you're one cool ferret)
Cully (even though I just took a chunk outta your roommate?)
and Amelia (how come nobody ever writes about us happy ferrets?  Not all
happy ferrets are alike, you know)
[Posted in FML issue 1754]