Shelter fights are nothing new. My memory right now is a bit short circuited by not having enough sleep for a few nights, so I definitely will miss some common causes. Sources of confusion which I can recall feeding into such difficulties in the past on the outsider's level: 1. People don't understand how to separate people's private lives from their shelter lives so they get upset if the shelter people have as good or nearly as good lives as others of their same age bracket in their section of the country. This can be increased if the observer is in an area of the nation like our's where housing costs are so high that even with high incomes people can't afford living conditions anywhere near as nice as people in other areas, or when being at a distance leads to incorrect assumptions of life style. (That doesn't only happen with shelter arguments, either. Twice I had ferret people who harassed me due to their assumptions about my race, and one other treated me badly due assumptions about my religion. I didn't correct the assumptions; if the people are going to be that narrow they don't deserve the time of day, but hopefully they'll later earn themselves the light of it. There used to be someone who would pretend to be me; the person apparently knew that Steve has a doctorate so assumed medical and assigned a life-style to the imaginary "me" which we'll never have without money falling from the sky.) Honestly, think about it, when posts are read it is easy to assume all sorts of things or to shade a word. For some here "home" means a mansion or mini mansion or multiple homes, to others it is free standing home or a townhouse, to us it is a small condo, to yet others it is a trailer, an apartment, a studio apartment, or a rented room. At least one member lives in a houseboat and I knew someone who lived on a 20' boat which he also used for part time after hours work. It's easy to shade a word with what we ourselves have experienced, or assumed, or desired without knowing what is different. For me the word "backyard" can trigger joyful imaginings of fruit trees, berries, lilacs, wisteria, mock orange, Carolina Sweet Shrub, a large herb garden, bulbs, a pond, bird feeders, a picnic bench, hammocks, and a swing. That comes of not having a backyard. LOL! 2. Medical costs vary with conditions, and shelters are often likely to get in ones with serious medical problems or in their old ages when multiple medical problems can arise. This is something people who are new to ferrets often don't know, or they naively assume a different range. We've found that the typical ferret these days seems to run us about $5,000 over the lifetime now. It used to be 3 k and probably still is in some other parts of the country. Our single most expensive one ran us $11,500 over his lifespan, and there are folks here on the FML who have ones who ran more; I know that for a fact. Hey, it happens. 3. The most common source of confusion I have seen in multiple past fights was confusion from rumors. Usually there would be a disagreement and then others would change the story as they passed it around and the further the story got from the two principals the worse the changes were. When people took sides it got especially bad. Sometimes those stories would feed back to the original parties. If they also believed rumors instead of realizing that the rumor mill changed things drastically they would get even more angry. At least three times I have seen an outside flame-baiter CREATE such rifts by saying that a fight was going on when it wasn't and just baiting people into taking sides. Then if people did take sides and if the named participants (who had not been fighting) were gullible enough to believe what the other supposedly said about them instead of checking directly with the other person then true war broke out. I've had someone try to create a fight with another person and me that way. Instead of fighting we talked together and with that list's wonderful moderator and posted notes of our own saying the person was a flame baiting you-know-what who was trying to create a fight where none existed, and even then some third parties just had to jump in and "take sides" when there weren't any sides, but that was diligently controlled. BTW, in case you don't know there ARE groups (usually of young males though the claimed identity can be anything and it's not always young males doing it) who actually have their own competitions to see who can create the biggest on-line fights, or if they can keep on-line fight going past a certain time frame by fanning the flames. They set up others and don't care who many get hurt or how badly, or even if they destroy a list (unless they get extra points from destroying a list). At least twice I have seen situations in which that tactic was used by animals abusers to damage the cooperation of shelters who had both been working together to stop or legally challenge the abuse. Ferrets are now something like a 2 Billion Dollar industry in the U.S. according to Ken Wells of the Wall Street Journal (I t may be 3, but I think 2 and I don't have time to check now); that is pretty well main stream. It's time that a number of aspects become more mainstream. It is time for vet schools to teach more about ferrets. It is time for more of the products to carry less of a mark-up (though food will always remain higher because ferret foods just are more expensive to make with their higher meat and fat levels). It is time for sheltering to be more mainstream as well, with more and more cooperative interactions between current private ferret shelters and their local humane groups leading toward the humane groups doing the sheltering and the fund raising eventually and with the current private shelterers becoming their experts on ferrets, their rehabbers, and their fostering homes for ones who need special care for a while. We have all known and spoken for a very long time now (at least ten years) about how the ability to fund ferret shelters was getting harder and harder, and how someday it will be prohibitive with the existing private shelter mode if it keeps up like it has. We have also spoken here often about how some shelters have simply wound up having to close their doors to new arrivals or have sub-standard care due to funding and time shortages. It is time to mainstream; heck, in many areas it is past time to mainstream. [Posted in FML issue 4525]