Diane - South Shore Ferret Care Wow, it's been a very busy summer, thank goodness for ferret sitting which connected great ferret folks and helped sustain our little shelter. In the middle of all the scooping and making soup, I noticed that the local grocery store seemed to be out of the Libby's 100% canned pumpkin that we occasionally add to our soup to help the ones with "the poopies". I chalked it up to being a seasonal thing, Spring and then all Summer when I couldn't find it at any store anywhere, checked with others and they couldn't find it either I first sent and email got a foolish "auto reply" and decided to call. At first I just acted like a regular consumer, the gal at Libby's was polite but really had not clue. I looked around some more, still no pumpkin. Heck, it's September, October and Thanksgiving 'round the corner, there should be pumpkin, right? I tried using the baby sweet potato, but nothing really "binds" like the great pumpkin. I used my last "pumpkin ice cube" (yes, I have weird things in my freezer downstairs, don't ever add anything in their to your soda, you'll get a surprise) and called again, determined to find out why a big company like Libby's wasn't stocking the shelves of the big supermarkets in the Boston area. After checking with some other shelters it seemed no pumpkin anywhere in the US? Now I was stumped, I called again, but went up to the parent company Purina/Nestle (figures). I worked my way through the voice mail system one region to another until I finally heard a phone actually ring and a real live person answered the phone, I kid you not, they had an accent and I'm not talking south, mid-west or even English! Yep, I reached the public relations department in Switzerland. Can you just imagine me trying to describe to the nice person why I needed to know why there was no pumpkin on the shelves at the grocery store, that yes, it was sort of an "urgent" nature to keep my "um ferrets regular". As you can guess, that didn't translate very well. I went on to try and describe using words like "binding" "digestive" etc. (Stop laughing, don't you do anything to get whatever your ferrets need?) After being put on hold several times, by George I think they finally got it! It was then that they explained that last year the flooding in the midwest almost wiped out the crop and they processed all that they could with what they could harvest. Some stores had extra until early Spring/Summer and then they ran out. The good news is that the new harvesting has been done for this year's crop and Libby's 100% Pumpkin should be on the shelves beginning this week. So the GREAT PUMPKIN is back, let the binding begin! Diane - South Shore Ferret Care [Posted in FML 6827]