Recently, We sent some copies of our forms we use for another shelter to go over and use if they wanted to. she e-mailed me back with questions about our clause # 3 in our adoption Agreement which states in part "That I will not allow this ferret to come by any means into the hands of, or anyone connected in any way with the owners, trainers or breeders of racing greyhounds." First, this does not refer to retired racing greyhounds. We have a few clients who have retired racing greyhounds that have demostrated to both parties satisfaction that they will not harm the ferrets. Not all racing greyhounds are trained with ferrets. But, sadly, some are, as ferrets are faster and more agile than rabbits. They are very good for mobility coordination training for the racing greyhounds. Shelters for ferrets are sometimes a cheaper alternative to buying ferrets in a store and for that reason, we refuse to allow any persons connected to the greyhound racing industry from owning one of our fuzzies. Trust me on this. Their are so many whackos out there that don't even have the grasp of the concept of compassion for animals. We recieve calls from ranchers all the time wanting our ferrets so they can turn them loose and eat all the prairie dogs on their ranches. Jus two weeks ago, a lady here in Colorado sent me an e-mail wanting a ferret cuz she heard they were good mousers and she had a lot of mice in her house. Last year, a guy came to my front door with a plastic bag of freshly killed prairie dogs, wanting to see if my ferrets would enjoy eating them. I was horrified as some of them were still bleeding. I advised him that he has just endangered every ferret in my shelter by bringing those poor, but dead little critters to my shelter. Almost all the prairie dog colonys are infected with sylvatic plague and some could be carriers of rabies. Although they can't bite anymore to infect anything, this guy had the gall to come to us with this bag of dead critters. I just let him know that if was still in my presence in 5 seconds, he would be arrested for tresspassing. Be careful of the motives of those wanting to adopt yur ferrets or buy them from you, you might just read or hear about something horrible that was done to them. Hugs to all, Ferretguy [Posted in FML issue 3174]