Hi All ... Sorry this is a few days after the first post on the subject, but am only just catching up on reading the past few weeks. Here in Western Australia - either when waiting to be able to breed a jill or when those intended to be sterilised beat us to the punch and come in to season early, we do, whenever possible, use vasectomised hobs to bring jills out of season as it is seems not to have the side effects that hormone injections can produce. In the same way that we use a full hob for breeding, we wait until the jill has been in season for two weeks before putting her with the hob because doing so before this is rape and the jill does not enjoy it one little bit. Putting the jill with the male at two weeks brings about a totally different mating .... the jill "plays hard to get" for about twenty minutes or so and then just rolls over and "says take me I'm yours". Mating in this way is a delightful ritual with no screaming & fighting at all ... and absolutely no stress for either the ferrets or their owners. We have also observed differences in behaviour between jills put with a vasectomised hob and not pregnant and those put with full males intended to produce kits. Following mating with a vasectomised hob the jill, although gaining a little wait and grooming humans more, she does not strip the fur from her underside to "line the nest" in readiness for her kits nor do her nipples grow in readiness for feeding and after the 42 day period she seems to happily go about her business as usual. On the other hand the pregnant jill seems to know she needs to prepare her nest (which we give her the opportunity to do by giving her her own breeding space at the end of the fourth week), her nipples do become prominent and she certainly gets really territorial with any and all other ferrets which come into her space. These are only a few of the usual differences but I have never had a jill show signs of distress after a "phantom" pregnancy. I have certainly seen distress when a birthing has gone wrong and none of the kits survived - fortunately this occurred on only one occasion as "Chloe" went completely nuts and it took more than three months for her to stop looking for her kits and start to get back to her previously loveable, cuddly self. Thanks to all for the links you provide to the other side of the world. Dianne. [Posted in FML 5623]