Mary wrote:

>I'm not too comfortable with the phrase:

>>All I want is a sweet ferret and the only thing I've ever got is
>>those stinky little fuzzballs at Petco...

>This kind of thinking is alarming. Those "fuzzballs at Petco" are
>animals too. (Most commercial breeders de-scent before a ferret
>is shipped to a store for sale.) These fuzzies can be de-scented;
>trained; and return love as much as any other ferret. I've had ferrets
>from Marshall Farms and Path Valley and privately bred. They all love.

Boy, is that ever true! I even had a Marshall Farms ferret possibly
save my life. We have had such farm ferrets typically live into late in
the 7th year to the middle of the 8th year, some older and some
younger, BTW.

Maybe this site, too, will be of real use to the poster.

I will spell the dots and write the URL in sections instead of putting
it as a live link because it is in Geocities and a number of places
block Geocities URLs due to the abuses of others:
http://www
DOT
geocities
DOT
com/SoHo/Lofts/
1083/probintro
DOT
html

It has a series of pages and, unless I missed something, the things on
this site itself I greatly like (but I do not completely like all of
the things it links to because I do not believe in physical punishment
of ferrets since that too often backfires badly and more because it
makes no sense to the ferret from a ferret perspective so is painfully
confusing). The first page of the site begins:

>"Problem" Ferrets and the People who Love Them
>
>This is a page about the ferrets who really need our help. Those are
>the adult ferrets who have for one reason or another turned to problem
>biting as a means of communication with the world. I stress here and
>throughout this web page that adult ferrets with serious biting
>problems are not normal. Very few healthy, happy ferrets with
>conscientious owners are biters; in this one respect, happy ferrets
>are all the same, more or less. While some of the topics addressed
>here might help with training a kit not to nip, the ordinary kind of
>training that any young animal, whether it be ferret, puppy, kitten,
>or even child, needs will not be a major focus of this page.

I also think that it is important if the girl is attracted to fancies
such as panda headed ferrets or blazes, or to albinos and dilutes that
she learn about reduced or absent hearing and/or sight because unless
a human adjusts her own behavior to that so here is are some sites to
help on those scores:

Blindness:
http://www.ferret-fact.org/Blind.htm
Blindness:
http://www.wolfysluv.com/blind_ferrets.html
Deafness:
http://www.wolfysluv.com/deaf.html

BTW, albino ferret eyes are so similar to the eyes of humans with
albinism that a great deal of the research to help those humans is
done with albino ferrets.

Sukie (not a vet)
Current FHL address:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ferrethealth
Recommended ferret health links:
http://pets.groups.yahoo.com/group/ferrethealth/
http://ferrethealth.org/archive/
http://www.afip.org/ferrets/index.html
http://www.miamiferret.org/fhc/
http://www.ferretcongress.org/
http://www.trifl.org/index.shtml
http://homepage.mac.com/sukie/sukiesferretlinks.html

[Posted in FML 5524]