Dear Ferret folks- A name is everything. The best names I ever gave weasels were the names that they showed me themselves. That would be "No" and "Don't", two ladies who were dumped namelessly when one of them became ill. Well, of course they were ill. They lived in a wire rabbit cage and ate nothing but cheap cat food. I didn't know it at the time, but they were also much older than the owners claimed. No only lived about a week, we were newbies and had no idea how ill she was. Don't had a few highly satisfactory years with us, years that got me forever hooked on ferrets. What could be more elementary? "NO! Get off of that!" "Don't for godsake DO that again!" No and Don't. There is a ferret on this list named BART! And every time I see that written I laugh, because it tells me so much about life with BART! What a wonderful name. "Pester" has got to be another one of my favourites. And "Epimethius" because it is such a lofty, literate name for a weasel. I understand that there is a "Ping is She" out there, and that does my heart good. Well, people have been asking me when I was going to get a friend for Todd. The answer was "once Allis Chompers the dog had some health issues resolved." It turned out that Allis was a lot sicker than we thought. The old leg injury was not the whole story. And I think her illness had a lot to do with what happened to my sweet Ping is He. Many thanks to the TenderHeart Veterinary Clinic in Gradner, Ma. Allis has a new lease on life. She is much more "herself" again, although she will never be trusted with a ferret as she was formerly. Now time out for ferrets to play is supervised time for Allis. That's just the way it is. (Note to people who live in *swamps*, you need a higher dose of heart worm preventive than you might imagine. My whole neighbourhood has this problem.) So now we have a friend for Todd. He is a long bodied albino, and his name is revealed to me as Hebert. Hebert is a very familiar name to children in my part of Massachusetts because of the Hebert candy company. They actually invented and introduced the recipe for the very first white chocolate. They still make it today, and it is AWESOME! As we say in Worcester County. And so is Hebert, although he is the dumbest, *the* dumbest ferret that I have ever met. He likes to climb things. But he can't figure out down. The first night he was here he climbed up into the four inch black landscape tubing that is attached to the cage. It goes up to the ceiling, punches through the wall, and runs for about twenty five feet along the living room ceiling. Well, he couldn't figure out how to get down. He got mightily scared and panicked. I finally had to pry the mesh end-cap off of the tube to get him out. He doesn't go up there, anymore. He climbs out of a simple chair as if he were negotiating the steepest face of Everest. He also bites feet. Bare feet. He finds them irresistible, so I'm apparently in socks for years to come. He swarms around any foot flesh left exposed by shoes, licks, sniffs, and finally bites. Putting him in time out does not help. He went after my sister's feet and she gently tossed him onto the sofa half a dozen times, finally saying "This ferret is so dumb he should have been sold with a wooden mallet to whap him on the head with." That sounds terrible, but if you were subject to one of his foot fetish sessions, you'd be looking for the mallet after a few minutes. Fortunately, he and Todd get along very well. Their play rocks the house half off of its foundations. "WHUMP! Patter-patter-patter BANG! Thumpa-thumpa-thumpa-thumpa WHAM! CRASH!" I have never heard such noise, but then again I never had two young males before. And land a Goshen, he pretty much poops in the cage, as does Todd. Then he helps Todd destroy the house. Any advice for a ferret with a foot fetish? Buy him his own pair of six inch stilletos to chew and a Gerorge Michaels poster? Alexandra in MA [Posted in FML 6132]