Dear Ferret Folks- Yesterday Gordon wrote of his two new fuzzies returning themselves to the cage. This is an interesting habit, one that I am not accustomed to. But I'm getting some practice with it! For some peculiar reason, Ping and Puma have recently started "putting themselves away" at the end of an out in the house session. First Puma started doing it pretty consistently, and Ping started following suit as he does not like to be separated from Puma. Now I'm getting used to finding the two curled up together in one of their hammies with the cage door wide open after an hour or two of play. I have *no* idea why Puma started the trend. I'm accustomed to ferrets *fighting* to keep from going back to the cage...turning themselves into smoke and burying themselves deep inside of sofas to stay "free" just a little while longer. At first I wondered if there was something unpleasant happening in the house to make Puma want a safer place. Was the dog being crabby? No. Was Puma's usual wrestling partner, Sterling the Silver cat playing too hard with her? No. She was still whuppin' his butt, as usual, despite his being easily seven times her weight--probably more. Sterling is pretty hard on the local birds and mice, but all of his hunting skill has not let him get the upper paw with Puma. She chases him all over the house, and the two have to be separated sometimes so that Sterling can catch his breath. As I have mentioned before, there is a reason we named her *Puma*, and not Cuddles or Fluffy. I feel bad about having to keep my small friends caged, but here in our new house we don't have a ferret room. In the year since we moved here I have seen Ping lose some of his muscle from cage life, the same muscle I saw him gain when we first brought him home and he went from having a cage to having his own big playroom. I give them lots of "out time", and it seems a waste that they want to spend some of it asleep in their cage with the door wide open. Maybe just having the door open, the knowledge that it is open puts them at ease. They know they can leave if they want to, and that is "freedom" of a kind from their perspective. It is certainly convenient. At first I would try to gather them up at the end of an out in the house session by squeaking their favourite rubber toy, and I was amazed the first few times they came running *out* of their cage! The whole point was to put them *in* the cage. I'd have to catch them and return them, and yes, it made me feel stupid. Maybe that's the point. It's an FLO mind trick. Play with the hoomins by putting yourselves away! Are there lots of FML'ers out there whose ferrets also "put themselves away?" Alexandra in MA [Posted in FML 5761]