>Our friend swears that right after she asked Dewy where her sister is, >Dewy marched right up to the second level of the cage and nudged the >hammock with her nose. Our friend had not realized there was another >layer on the hammock they could sleep in. Sure enough the missing >ferret was right where Dewy had shown her. Sherman used to find each by name and we had him do it pretty much every day. Since we had as many as seven in those years he was very helpful. Currently, Orville refuses and we think he considers it tattling because he consistently points in the opposite direction which can also be helpful. Kessy often will tell but the request has to be whispered to her. On very rare occasions Pivot will realize that we really mean it and will point out where someone is. The best ferret locator episode, though, happened many years ago with Meltdown when Warp was just a kit. Like our current Pivot, Warp would often sleep when being called and even snoozed through ducky squeaking. It's isn't deafness, just deep sleep. One day we absolutely HAD to find Warp, then just a kit, who had been out playing and had crashed somewhere. Steve looked Meltdown in the eye and several times repeated, "Meltdown get Warp then Meltdown get treat". After a bit she fussed to get down, went under the platform bed, and soon emerged dragging sleepy Warp by the scruff, deposited Warp on Steve's foot, then looked up at Steve and licked her chops. (Meltdown very mush believed in depositing on Steve's big feet. When really annoyed with him she would sometimes turd on one of his feet.) Ferrets can be funny with how they put together commands. When Pivot was first having trouble accepting Keskittää (which means Focus) we tried to remind Pivot how well Telemna had accepted her. At that point we had had another ferret inbetween, Ariane who died of JL at less than a year of age, but apparently one of Telemna's behaviors was still strongly stuck in Pivot's mind. Emmy (Telemna) used to play piano (and you will notice that they had great drag games that day including dragging a food dish that scattered kibble everywhere): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ayJ-WvVaRnE Well, Pivot took a long while before she accepted Kessy, BUT when I repeatedly urged her to be like Telemna (who had immediately accepted Pivot and nurtured her) Pivot began playing a toy piano more than a year after Emmy's death! She does not play Telemna's piano. Instead she plays a larger one and she really tries. Music is definitely not the important part of Pivot's life that it was for Emmy. Emmy even used to go into what looked like a trance when listening to music and had strong favorites like Liza Minelli singing anything, the theme song from that film about the first modern Olympics, and "Eat the Rich" which for some reason was her absolute favorite. She actually listened intensely to wide range of music. She'd try to jam with some, and she could duplicate 8 notes precisely (at time a few more so some patterns may have made more sense to her) if they were repeated to her a few times. Despite music not being her thing Pivot apparently felt that being more like Telemna meant piano playing so for the last year she has played maybe 4 to 6 days every week and is getting better at it. We find that the ferrets who are not deaf are incredibly capable with understanding sounds. That is not a huge surprise. Their ancestors had to deal in the total darkness of burrows, knowing aspects of what they were stalking and the associated sounds, and of what might be stalking them or their kits and their sounds, as well as safe sounds, so they are pre-adapted for dealing with sounds. They just need consistent repetition in words and structure. (We even had a partly deaf one who did okay as long as sounds were pitched low enough for her range of hearing loss. If someone spoke to her in too high a pitch she would place a hand on their moving lips as if trying to determine if they were making any sounds so she MIGHT have been self-aware of not hearing some things.) I think we became aware of ferrets understanding language about 30 years ago due to two things. We noticed that if we mentioned that one of the other ferrets had stashed a treat that Fritter would check that OTHER ferret's favorite stash places, not her own, and then steal it. Also, a treating vet who was just learning ferrets noticed with ours that they responded to their names more readily than most dogs and far more readily than cats. Fritter, BTW, had her own signature things like any ferret. When she was alpha for some unknown reason for discipline she would sit back on her haunches and bop the offending ferret on the nose. She was the only one, ferret or human, who did that. We also used to drink non-alcoholic wine with dinners pretty often then and many had a plastic cap cover that was designed to look like a cork was present under the foil. A lot of ferrets loved batting those around but Fritter liked to line up her bum over one and fill it with feces. Many days we would find those caps sitting on a bathroom floor, filled, with one or two little brown dots from her preferred version of wiping nearby. So, long way around, but, yes, Dewey very well might have just decided to do exactly what was requested. Sukie (not a vet) Ferrets make the world a game. Recommended ferret health links: http://pets.groups.yahoo.com/group/ferrethealth/ http://ferrethealth.org/archive/ http://www.miamiferret.org/ http://www.ferrethealth.msu.edu/ all ferret topics: http://listserv.ferretmailinglist.org/archives/ferret-search.html "All hail the procrastinators for they shall rule the world tomorrow." (2010, Steve Crandall) A nation is as free as the least within it. [Posted in FML 7824]