Betty wrote: >When my hubby and I first got together, we were opposing in our beliefs in >terms of what kind of family non-human companion we would like to bring >into our home. I thought that folks might like to know how Steve and I first wound up with ferrets around 20 years ago. Our's is a relationship where we are best friends in addition to being in love and in which we each tend to place the other person first -- it just flows like that because the greatest happiness is from keeping the other happy and safe. Can you guess now how we got our first ferret? Yep! He thought that I wanted a ferret and I thought that he wanted one! Granted, we should have talked about it more, but our hearts were in the right place and those same hearts were rewarded when we both fell in love with ferrets. There's been a lot of discussion on economics and ferrets. The problem isn't really with an economic class, though. It's with money distribution. When people don't have cash then the best thing is think outside the box (like when i was putting myself through college so could barely -- and sometimes not really given that I had malnutrition more than once then -- feed myself while paying for tuition, texts, and a roof over my head). Here are two solutions: 1. to help with someone else's animals (which is what i did then) or 2. to work out a fostering agreement with a shelter. In a fostering agreement -- which has the best of two worlds -- the person can have a critter but the shelter covers the medical costs, while the fostering person covers day-to-day costs and day-to-day chores. These help everyone as a result. We have 6 ferrets; 7 till recently. Because our economic situation is changing in a downward direction due the Labs being dissolved and because we are under stress from having had had two recent deaths in our human family, one in our ferret family, and a near-death in our human family (all separate and within less than 6 weeks of each other) we aren't adopting right now. So far this year we have had $1,706 in ferret costs with most of that being medical and last year we had around $11,500 in ferret medical costs because the ferrets are all but one in age groups prone to medical problems. That should give an idea of the financial responsibilities people have to be ready for. Our area is expensive; so halve that for much less expensive locations. Thank goodness for budget books; they keep us solvent and have provided an economic cushion. Some pains-in-the-butt (like budget books) just are more than worth the nuisance of keeping them. I know those paragraphs are a touch confusing. Am very rushed for time, so, please, just re-read them if confused. [Posted in FML issue 3714]