Thought I'd introduce myself and our three fuzzies.
We are in the UK (Exmouth, Devon) and live half way down a country lane
(about a mile from houses in either direction (apart from our landlord
next door), and we are surrounded by crop land, cows and woods. My
daughter (14) had been working on my husband for us to get ferrets
eventually (in a year or so), then one Thursday evening mid October,
Hubby spotted a white ferret sticking his nose out from under my mini
plastic grow house playing with a crab apple. Having rounded this one
up (with minor injury to my daughters hand, by rolling more crab apples
past him - named Archimedes by hubby - who is a mathematician), we
discovered another in the garage when we went to find a large plastic
toy box as a temporary home for the first, this one practically climbed
up my leg then bit my hand - he was named Voldemort by my daughter due
to the white face and red eyes - and the fact he was acting very mean
and butch at the time. 2 days later I found the third and called her
Willow and brought her in attached to my hand (it seemed a nice safe
gender neutral name) the vet initially sexed her as a boy it became
evident a couple of weeks later he was wrong when adolescence kicked
in! :-).
We let all the local vets know in case someone had suffered a break
out, but given our location we suspect they were dumped.
After two weeks of careful teaching, feretone, a new home and toys and
regular meals (they were skin and bones when they turned up), they
abruptly decided to trust us and stopped trying to nip us at all. Then
adolescence hit and we had to get Willow neutered pretty fast or have
Archy beat her up the whole time (Voldy seemed more interested in
looking after Willow and dragging Archy round by the scruff though!).
They've now all been neutered and have healed up nicely and are back
to being playful kitten/puppies.
They have a large 3 story cage for sleeping in the bathroom where the
heat is always on but fairly low, and we have a doggy play pen set up
in the living room for play time - with cat toys, tunnels, tubes and a
rice box in a minor rotation.
Voldemort has proved to be an incredible softy who likes to look after
and groom everyone (often my ears, and has a habit of trying to nibble
my spots off for me :-) ), Archimedes is daft as a brush and likes to
play hide and go dance around tag when allowed out of the play pen -
which is fairly often as he's an escape artist, Willow, after a very
nippy start has turned into a playful bundle of extremely bright energy
who hasn't tried to bite any of us since she bit my ear hard 2 weeks
after we found them - even when she went in for her neutering - they
all got very positive comments from the vets with all the prodding
and pocking they got around their ops, no one tried to nip any of the
strangers (even though when we took them in after finding all of them
they *all* tried to bite the vet they met :-)
Willow's latest game is a somewhat rather OCD game in the rice box
where she reverses at speed in a circle with a soft turtle between her
front paws digging backwards. She'll keep it up for minutes on end if
one of the boys doesn't jump in to see what she's up to.
[Posted in FML 6543]
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