>If my first ferret had been 60%, as you say yours are, I never would have
>adopted a second.  An animal that craps all over your house with no hope of
>being trained otherwise isn't the kind of animal one should have as a pet.
 
Um, that means all rodents and birds are not the kind of animals people
should have as pets... not to mention many other creatures, like most
lizards, marsupials, pretty much everything other than cats, dogs, ferrets,
maybe rabbits.  Cats are easy to litter train, dogs are fairly easy to
housebreak, ferrets and rabbits are similar in difficulty, and it gets
harder after that.  But people still have pet birds and rats and sugar
gliders and chinchillas and rabbits and guinea pigs.  Many love them every
bit as much, and with as much reason, as we love our ferrets.
 
(Yes, I know some birds can be cage trained, etc, but you have to admit
it's not exactly common.  Same for G. pigs, even rats.)
 
Scraping ferret poop is not my favorite occupation, but since we started
sheltering, I do rather a lot of it.  Even when we only had our own six,
we had quite a few accidents outside the cage.  It's wonderful to be able
to train ferrets to use a litterbox--and ours do, absolutely and without
exception, INSIDE the cage--but ferret poop is pretty much a fact of life
with ferrets.  Even a good ferret, when outside running around the house,
isn't perfect.  And the more you have, the less perfect they are. :-)
 
I have nothing but admiration for the owners (and ferrets!) who have
achieved near-perfect litter practices.  <g>  In fact, we have one beauty
who's wonderful.  But I'll admit it's not at the absolute top of our list
of desires.  We'd like the biters to stop biting and the neurotic rescues
to relax and learn to trust people.  We also want them to poop somewhere
near the litterboxes, in them if possible.  Hard for a critter who's lived
his whole life in a fishtank on its side with newspaper on the bottom of
it.  Which, by your definition, means that particular ferret wouldn't make
a good pet, right?  In fact, he's absolutely wonderful, even if he does
poop in undesignated areas a lot.
 
It's a decision anyone who wants to own a ferret needs to make BEFORE they
get the little critter.  Not every ferret can be litterbox trained
perfectly.  Not every person is a perfect trainer.  If a potential owner
won't want an animal that will miss the litterbox sometimes, or pick the
darndest places to poop, or leave presents in front of the door when he's
mad--they need to get a cat, or maybe a hermit crab, not a ferret.
 
I'm not telling anyone to get rid of a pet they already have!  I'm just
saying that adopting a pet is a serious commitment--a sentiment shared by
many here--and should be made with as much knowledge as possible about what
you're getting into.  And, with ferrets, you're getting poop.  Plenty of
it. :-)
 
For me, it all evens out nicely.  The fun, love, joy, and thousands of
little ferret-shaped lessons far outweigh the poop and even the illnesses
and periods of grief.  Otherwise, I wouldn't do this.  Who would?
 
Jen and the Crazy Business: Molly (Maley; lazy), Gibber, Tesseract, Winter,
Simon (aka Mr. Clumsy), Amadeo (Armand), Random, Handsome (Frankenfert),
Lucy, Pinky, Carma, and Esperanza.
[Posted in FML issue 2748]