When I was a teenager, I was an avid Redwall reader, waiting each year for the next book to come out (much like present day children and Harry Potter.) There are many ferrets in all of his books, but Brian has divided up his characters into "good" and "evil". I read about it once on the Redwall site, and I don't remember it entirely, but there were reasons for putting each animal into each catagory. Ferrets do fall into into the evil catagory, solely on the basis of them being closely related to the other "evil" animals (stoats, weasels etc.) Brian loves scrambling words, notice Veil is evil. The Outcast of Redwall is the only one (at least the earlier ones, I haven't kept up in years) that actually starred a ferret however.I think Brian's books are wonderful, even though ferrets are "evil" in them. He also noted that these animals are obviously NOT pets, (like the stoats, weasels, foxes), and that in no way is he trying to give domesticated ferrets a bad name. If you read the first few books, the main evil characters are cats (who we all know are also domesticated pets), so he isn't just singling out poor ferrets. -Kira [Posted in FML issue 4447]