Thought I'd introduce myself and our three fuzzies. We are in the UK (Exmouth, Devon) and live half way down a country lane (about a mile from houses in either direction (apart from our landlord next door), and we are surrounded by crop land, cows and woods. My daughter (14) had been working on my husband for us to get ferrets eventually (in a year or so), then one Thursday evening mid October, Hubby spotted a white ferret sticking his nose out from under my mini plastic grow house playing with a crab apple. Having rounded this one up (with minor injury to my daughters hand, by rolling more crab apples past him - named Archimedes by hubby - who is a mathematician), we discovered another in the garage when we went to find a large plastic toy box as a temporary home for the first, this one practically climbed up my leg then bit my hand - he was named Voldemort by my daughter due to the white face and red eyes - and the fact he was acting very mean and butch at the time. 2 days later I found the third and called her Willow and brought her in attached to my hand (it seemed a nice safe gender neutral name) the vet initially sexed her as a boy it became evident a couple of weeks later he was wrong when adolescence kicked in! :-). We let all the local vets know in case someone had suffered a break out, but given our location we suspect they were dumped. After two weeks of careful teaching, feretone, a new home and toys and regular meals (they were skin and bones when they turned up), they abruptly decided to trust us and stopped trying to nip us at all. Then adolescence hit and we had to get Willow neutered pretty fast or have Archy beat her up the whole time (Voldy seemed more interested in looking after Willow and dragging Archy round by the scruff though!). They've now all been neutered and have healed up nicely and are back to being playful kitten/puppies. They have a large 3 story cage for sleeping in the bathroom where the heat is always on but fairly low, and we have a doggy play pen set up in the living room for play time - with cat toys, tunnels, tubes and a rice box in a minor rotation. Voldemort has proved to be an incredible softy who likes to look after and groom everyone (often my ears, and has a habit of trying to nibble my spots off for me :-) ), Archimedes is daft as a brush and likes to play hide and go dance around tag when allowed out of the play pen - which is fairly often as he's an escape artist, Willow, after a very nippy start has turned into a playful bundle of extremely bright energy who hasn't tried to bite any of us since she bit my ear hard 2 weeks after we found them - even when she went in for her neutering - they all got very positive comments from the vets with all the prodding and pocking they got around their ops, no one tried to nip any of the strangers (even though when we took them in after finding all of them they *all* tried to bite the vet they met :-) Willow's latest game is a somewhat rather OCD game in the rice box where she reverses at speed in a circle with a soft turtle between her front paws digging backwards. She'll keep it up for minutes on end if one of the boys doesn't jump in to see what she's up to. [Posted in FML 6543]