Dear Ferret Folks- Over the years I have heard a few ferrets bark, always when they were startled, not in response to a dog. If you sneak up on Puma when she is sleepy and not paying attention, she might give a single "bark" of surprise and whirl around to look at you. I know that she hears just fine. We call her with one of two rubber squeakies. She will come at the sound of either, Ping will generally only come for the higher pitched of the two. He ignores the lower pitched one that works just fine with Puma. But it's not just ferrets that bark...oh, no. Years ago my little sister went downstairs in the middle of the night for a call of nature, the upstairs bathroom wasn't working for some reason at the time. She flipped on the downstairs reading room light and there she saw a skunk, standing right smack in the middle of my Mother's good wool Persian carpet. A beautiful, fat, ebony and whipped cream white skunk. My sister froze in horror and so did the skunk, but then it let out a loud single bark, and ran beneath a bookcase. My sister took the back way to my mother's bedroom and explained to my very sleepy mother that there was a SKUNK in the house! What to do? My mother said that it had almost certainly come in through the cat flap in the reading room wall. Leave the side door near the cat flap wide open to the night, and turn off the lights. Screw the heat bill. The skunk would leave on its own. Thankfully, it did,without engaging either of our two elderly house cats. My sister had noted before that night that there were strange muddy prints on the kitchen floor around the cat's water and food dishes. At the time, she and my mother theorized that a raccoon must be coming in through the cat flap at night. Nope. Alexandra in MA PS It never returned...not that we *know* of. If it did it wiped its feet first. [Posted in FML 5777]