Dear Ferret Folks-
 
I try to be a good ferret Mommy.  I try.  I try not to feed them things
that are bad for them.  Some time ago, I read that the new thought
was that raisins were BAD for ferrets.  My whole body sagged with
disappointment when I read that.  It was the end of an era.  Reluctantly,
I took my round red can, and threw it away.  I never bought another.
That was back when Switch and Lily were both hale and hearty, and some
irrational part of me thought they would live forever, my two good
friends.
 
But ferrets bounce out of your lives as unpredictably as they bounce into
your lives sometimes, and Switch and Lily both set paws on the Rainbow
Bridge, and padded away from me.  I miss them.  But I was fortunate to
find first Ping in a shelter, then Puma in a store.  They both said that
I could take them home, so I did.  Home being a place with no raisins.
Ever.
 
Or was it?
 
Last week I made a critical error.  I went grocery shopping while hungry.
I bought all sorts of things that I really didn't need.  Half a dozen
mangoes.  Two more bags off egg noodles to add to the two already in my
pantry.  More microwave popcorn than I generally eat in a year.  A bag
of trail mix.  I never buy trail mix.  But this stuff looked good.  It
had entire apricot halves, and lots of those kibbled pellets made from
rolled dates.  Yum.  It also had the more ordinary little multicolored
fruit cubes, and lots or raisins.  Lots of raisins.
 
At some point I must have opened the cellophane bag and sat by the
computer, and chowed.  Then I left the bag by the keyboard, and forgot
all about it.  Ping found it last night.  I discovered him squatting
down on his haunches with his head in the bag, illuminated only by the
blue light of the computer monitor.  He was munching as fast as he could.
I peeked in at him to see *what* he was munching.  If it was mango or
pineapple cubes, I was going to have a fit.  I found them almost
inedible, so fibrous inside they seemed almost *hairy*, really nasty!
There was a reason I put the bag down and forgot about it.
 
But no, true to his ferrety nature, he was bogarting raisins as fast as
he possibly could.  Once he realized I was watching him, he wiggled his
eyebrows and rolled his eyes in a classic Groucho Marx expression of
exasperation, and chewed faster, knowing that he was about to have the
bag taken away.  He was right.  I took it away.  I wonder if he had
raisins at his first home, the one that dumped him at the shelter, and
he'd spent a year at my house longing for them.  I'll never know.
 
I figured oh, what the hell.  It's raisin night.  I walked the bag over
to Puma, who eats NOTHING but kibble and carefully handed her a raisin.
*Zip!* she snatched it from my fingers, and disappeared beneath the
bureau in the living room.  I could hear wet munching noises.  My husband
and I were duly impressed, and made reference to that old commercial--
"Hey Mikey, he likes it!" This from the ferret who hates *everything* but
dried kibble.  Munch munch munch.  Puma's pointy shark head emerged from
beneath the bureau, and her deep, dark eyes looked up at me hopefully.
Her whiskers were hitched forward in a particularly attentive fashion.
 
"Here you go, girl.  It's raisin night." I handed her another one.
*Zip!* back beneath the bureau.  Munch munch munch.Ping ran under the
bureau, just to see if Puma had dropped any grape molecules.  Nope.
All gone.  Her very first raisins, and nobody had had to tell her what
to do with them.
 
I'm not going to be buying any more raisins.  But I think I'll distribute
the rest of the raisins in the trail mix bag, just for old times sake.
I'll feed them out a little at a time, as long as they stay plump and
moist.  True, it will weigh down my ferret Mommy karma, but I'll deal
with that in the next life.
 
Alexandra in MA
[Posted in FML issue 5157]