Quoting Barbkitty...
 
>RATS- Can anyone out there give me hope?  I am about to get a pet rat or
>two.  Is it at all possible to make a rat and ferret get along?
 
Barb, please be careful.  Our two ferrets have free run of my daughter's
room, which also contains the aquarium-homes of our five rats.  Generally,
the ferrets aren't too interested in the rats in this situation.  Once in a
while, when I'm cleaning the rats, Zeke, our six-month-old gib, likes to get
up on the lowest rat-level shelf (about 18 inches above the floor) and check
them out; however, we don't let him linger, and he seems content in having
many other interesting things to investigate elsewhere in the room.  The one
time that we let rats check out the ferrets, the ferrets began hissing--not
a good sign.
 
The problem is basically the same as trying to socialize a cat with rats:
The latter is instinctively seen as food by the former.  Environment and
conditioning have a lot to do with it, of course: If your ferrets aren't
given little animals to eat (and don't usually find any on their own), they
will be far less likely to look at your rats as "caged tacos"; but I really
believe that trying to socialize them, nose-to-nose, would be risky, at
best.
 
Paul Sadek
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[Posted in FML issue 1608]