My husband and I have three children and we all love animals. We had gerbils, rats, and hamsters and everything was going well until my husband became allergic to rodents. He breaks out in hives when he touches them, so we could not replace them as they passed on. When our youngest son's dwarf hamster died at the extreme old age of five years, we decided he deserved a new pet, but we needed to find something non-rodent. I said that I was willing to help care for anything except a stinky ferret. We happened to be in the car discussing the stinkiness of ferrets, so we stopped at the pet store so I could illustrate my point about just how stinky they are. My husband dragged us away from the ferret cage and out of the pet store 30 minutes later saying that we didn't have a proper cage for an adorable little ferret. We went home and researched the proper care of ferrets, ordered a cage from Martin's, and bought a copy of Ferrets for Dummies. My husband looked up the local ferret shelter and after some discussion we decided it would be best to adopt. So I called the shelter mom and told her I would like to adopt a ferret for my 13 year old son. She said, no, absolutely not. Teenagers are likely to get busy with high school, get girlfriends, go away to college, and it's just not the right time in their lives to adopt a ferret. It took me a good 30 minutes to talk her into at least meeting with us and explained that all of the pets in our home are family pets, though the ferret would take up residence in my son's room. So, we went to the shelter with all three of our teenaged sons, and we spent the afternoon playing with every adoptable ferret in the shelter. We wound up adopting the most adorable little ferret, who unfortunately doesn't care for the company of other ferrets. It's been three years. My now 16 year old son is still the ferret's best pal, though he loves all of us. His out of cage time is part of our daily routine and he travels with us when we go on vacation. He's seven years old and when he passes on to the bridge, we will be adopting two or three more not so stinky ferrets from the shelter. [Posted in FML issue 5095]