Dear Ferret Folks- As people who got their first ferrets with no useful ferret info./background whatsoever, it seemed that every new "game" was a first-ever, unique ferret event. It wasn't until I joined the FML that I learned otherwise, but that didn't make each new 'game' discovery in my home less hilarious at the time of discovery! (Or sometimes intensely irritating, terrifying...you get the idea. It varies from game to game.) Our 'discovery' of Daleking was something I will never forget. We first saw it with Switch the Kit, who liked to eat the dog's, the Noble Allis Chomper's dog food right out of the bowl. Poor Alice. She has suffered so many ferret indignities over the years. She has lived ten of her eleven years with ferrets, and she has stories to tell I am sure, if only those paws could type. It was a big yellow plastic bowl that we kept filled with dog kibble. It rested on the lineloleum floor of the kitchen, tucked away into a corner. Switch used to waddle over to it (she was a husky girl) and graze. She would stand on her back feet, and her top half would basically hang over the edge of the bowl. Her belly would flatten out over the rim of the bowl, and all you could see of her was something that looked like a gray furry eggplant with two little feet on the bottom. There were crunching sounds. Allis would watch, in canine agony, mooing softly to herself every few minutes. (Oh, the horror...) This arrangement worked fine as long as the bowl was full. Switch could hang on the side like that. But then came the day that the bowl was virtually empty, and she tried it. She stood up against it, draped herself over the rim, and it promptly fell over on her and upside-down, trapping her inside. So what did she do? Panic, of course. As only a ferret can panic. Picture this in your mind's eye. A huge cheap yellow plastic bowl, about two feet across, upside-down on my kitchen floor zipping around seemingly of its own accord. It would bounce off of the cabinets, off of the base of the dish washer, bounce off of the bottom of the refidgerator. The dog was barking madly. I run to see what is happening, and I find this game of floor hockey happening with no explanation. Switch is silent under there, running blindly as fast as she can, and bouncing off of hard surfaces. Taking my life in my hands (I have seen "Poltergeist", after all) I put one bare foot on top of the bowl to stop it. It does stop, but there is a scrambling, scratching, scrabbling noise inside. Something is thrashing under there. I reach down and flip the bowl over....and there is Switch the Kit. Staticed to within an inch of her life, totally poofed, her fur mashed in fourteen different directions, panting. She didn't even make eye contact, she just fled. I figured we wouldn't be seeing any more of *that*, thank you. I thought she had learned her lesson. Silly me. I don't know when she decided that this had actually been kind of fun, but evidently that was her take on the whole event. She learned to burrow in the dog food when the level was low in the bowl so that she could spill it onto the floor, and tip the bowl over. She did it again. And again. And again over the short years of her life. (She left us too soon, too soon.) The thing was she *always* had to be rescued. She could not tip the bowl back off of herself. I never came home from an outing and found her trapped under there. She knew enough to only play this game when there were hoomins nearby to rescue her when the fun was over. It wasn't much fun for the dog, to see her food spilled all over the kitchen floor while some, some *weasel* played bumper pool in the middle of it. Oh, if Allis could type. The ferret game of "jump on the dog's wagging tail", or "wait until the dog is asleep and run bodily across and over her"....Ping's game of "Let's bite the dog's nose to see what happens"...(that was a short game, played only once and then abandoned!) Alexandra in MA [Posted in FML 5679]