Insurance: We have never placed an insurance claim with our carriers for anything except on our dental and medical insurance, and back when we had medical insurance for catastrophic care only that went about 10 years without a claim. The result is that most of the time that we have had ferrets (not the very early time since we didn't have home insurance then) we have also had insurance. We have only once had to have a consultation with an insurance agent (when someone who drove into our legally stopped car in a parking lot had her insurance company stall on fixing our car) and that took very little time in which he gave us perfect advice for getting paid by the other company. Yes, they have wiggle room. When the company Steve worked for offered a special rate through a different company our history caused our carrier to offer an unbeatable price. I guess that what I am saying is that the claim past might play into getting or not getting insurance. Yes, there have been times that a ferret has stolen a camera and dropped it, or damaged our carpet, but we consider those expected costs which we simply have to handle ourselves or do without, and consider that worth it due to not raising premiums and due to having insurance available. For us the insurance is there in case something major like a fire happens. We also are very careful about raising our ferrets to be extra gentle (with no physical punishment) and we are extra careful that if people without animal skills are in the house that they have very controlled interactions or no interactions even despite our ferrets being so gentle. Anyway, I suspect that the past use history for insurance may play into things. Oh, WOW, a home repair (and other repairs since they mention bikes) site. THANKS for mentioning that, Claire! D., do be careful. Ingested nicotine can kill a ferret, and side stream smoke from cigarettes has been shown in a cat study to greatly increase the risk of developing lymphoma so there is always the concern of possibly seeing the same result with ferrets. Because I have to carry meds in case of an anaphylactic reaction we hung shaker pegs in an unclimbable spot and that is where my pocketbook lives. And for those who don't know, some ferrets do easily open zippers. When Meltdown first figured zippers out we had to have a moratorium on others going near here because she discovered that opening people's flies got her a lot of attention! Don't think that just because a pocketbook (or anything else) is zipped that the ferret won't get into it. In April of 2002 Barbara mentioned a home using Boric Acid in which ferrets died, and Roger replied in http://fhl.sonic-weasel.org/browse.php?msg=YG12549. I'd DEFINITELY check with the ASPA's poison page, and with similar resources. Look in the FML Archives both for cautions and for things others have used successfully. You will find the location of the FML Archives in the headers of the FML. Like Linda, I've used Ela's tip about peppermint oil, and have also found a combo of peppermint oil and lemon oil to be useful to repel a type of tiny fungus beetle that can climb through screens when young and used to come up from our wood chips some years. In fact, we'll likely have them this Spring since the Winter's been so wet here. [Posted in FML issue 4085]