Dear Ferret Friends-

I write friends today rather than 'folks' because really, I am only
interested in how my friends will feel about what I am going to say.
Some of you have already gone through what my husband and I just did,
especially folks who take in those "castoff' ferrets that someone
suddenly finds inconvenient. And I will never forget it, because it
was one of the saddest things that I have ever seen in my entire life.

And I owe some apologies, big ones, because I read the stories here in
the FML, but I never entirely believed them. I did not believe that a
castoff ferret, dumped in a shelter could actually grieve itself to
death at the loss of its home, its hoomins, however poor a specimen
of the hoomin race that they might collectively represent. I never
believed that a ferret that had lost its cagemate would literally lie
down and decide to die. But I am here to tell you, yes, it does happen.
And I am very sad to tell my friends who appreciated her, that this is
what happened to Puma sometime in the night on Wednesday.

Now you have a choice. You can start ranting that Alexandra in MA has
just gone and killed another ferret, (Yahoo! Yippee!!) in which case I
would like to treat you a very specific,* very* vulgar hand gesture
generally seen in the British Isles, which I will not describe here in
too much detail. You are either familiar with it, or you are not. No
doubt a few of you will deserve it with the utmost triple-distilled
degree of sincerity that my left hand can render it in. 
!!!(....)!!!

For the rest of you, you may remember that my husband brought home
young Todd to be a cagemate to Puma after Ping had been killed by Allis
Chompers. Yes, she is still noble, Allis is. She does not realize what
a terrible thing she did. Puma reacted very badly to the loss of Ping.
She suddenly seemed like a little ferret-shaped ghost wandering around
the house dazedly. She stopped eating right. My husband thought Todd
would make a good friend for her, and she would perk up and be Puma
again.

She did, for about two days. And then, she stopped playing with Todd.
Stopped playing, period. She slept with him, but that was it. Todd
stopped even trying to play with her, and wanted to play with us,
instead. I finally realized that there was a pattern to her wandering.
She would leave the cage, and start going around our house in laps,
laps that all had a right hand turn to them, over and over again. She
would stop many times during her lap, and search out all of Ping's
favourite sleep spots. The one inside the yellow sofa, the one beneath
the velvety green sofa, the one inside his favourite drawer with the
zip lock bag of crayola crayons in it, then into our room and his
favourite spot beneath our bed among the bags of seasonal clothing that
I store there. Then back to the yellow sofa. Over and over and over
until she was tired. She would pick one of his spots, and lie down
in it.

I never knew a ferret who reacted to a squeaky toy as strongly as Puma
did. She would hear it,and she would explode from wherever she happened
to be. She would come running, and try to take a bite out of whoever
was holding the squeakie. She nailed me countless times over the years.
She used to hang from the squeakie by her teeth. And after she started
sleeping in Ping's spots, she stopped coming. I would look down beneath
the bed and see her, watching me as I squeezed and squezed. She didn't
get up. I had to crawl under and get her. Actually, Puma never bit me
once after Ping died. Not once.

Puma decided that she had no real further interest in food. I resorted
to cheating, I let her eat raisins if it made her happy. I would have
soaked the damn raisins in forty year old VSOP brandy if that's what it
took to make her eat her fill. I tried the lovely porrige/duck soup mix
that Diane Walls from MAFF sent me. No. She would not touch it. I spoke
to ferret friends. I tried her on the baby food with cream concoction.
I spoke to a vet. I tried the canned pumpkin mixed with ferretone. No.
Her poops were good, just infrequent. I took her off her oral melatonin
to see if that would stimulate her appetite. No difference. She would
only lick her 'tone indifferently. She lost interest in her sticky
ferret vitamin paste. And in her cage, she would just lie in her
hammie, staring.

I decided damn the torpedoes, tomorrow I was going to take Puma and my
Visa card to Tufts Small Animal Hospital in Grafton, and I was going
to use that card until it melted. I got up very early in the morning
with my ferret carrier. I had confiscated it days earlier because I
kept finding Puma in there, staring. It's last occupant had been Ping,
making his last trip home. I knelt down and looked into the ferret
cage. Young Todd was wrapped around Puma, one front arm thrown across
her chest. He heard me and sat halfway up, looking up at me with a
dark, unfathomable expression. Then he lay down and rested his chin
atop her head. Puma was gone. Puma was gone. I wonder what he thought.

Todd appeared to look for Puma off and on for about half an hour after
I lifted her away from his embrace. Then he seemed to say "Ahhh, she's
gone" and has not appeared to be in any other way upset by her loss. I
am keeping a very close eye on him. My husband was away from home for
work for a few days, and I had to tell him what had happened. Puma was
his baby, his baby. He had to digest the news from some sterile hotel
room in Bar Harbor, Maine. When he comes home we will lay her to rest
with Ping. I hope the two of them are in some sunny Afterworld,
trotting in the long grass, stopping to wrestle, sniffing things,
finding beautiful spots to nap in and with all the time in the
universe to reminisce. Perhaps there are tractors in the Afterworld.
Big green ones, with yellow rims.

And again, for anyone crass enough to exult in our bereavement,,,,
!!!(...)!!!    !!!(...)!!!
Both hands this time. 

Alexandra in MA

[Posted in FML 6098]