We've had our weasels for about six months now. We got Penny first, and after about six weeks we knew that one ferret was not enough, so we got Zoe. Penny is grey, and has a tiny white spot over each eye, almost like eyebrows, so she always has a somewhat quizzical expression. Zoe is brown, which makes it easy to tell them apart. Zoe is more aggressive, and is usually the one who starts the chasing and wrestling matches. She's also a jumper; I've seen her jump over a foot in the air to catch a toy or try to get onto a shelf where she shouldn't be. Penny is more earthbound and moody. If we're playing with her with a toy and Zoe comes over to join in, Penny will walk away and lay flat on the floor and "sulk" because she's not getting all the attention. Penny also takes immediate possession of any squeeky toys we being home, and makes sure they are always in their proper place in a corner of the cage. If we take them out and scatter them around the room, she runs around frantically picking them up and racing back to the cage with them. If we try to keep her away from the cage, she will secure the toys in the other hidey houses we have for the ferrets. Then at night, after we've gone to bed, we hear some furtive squeeking as she retrieves them, and in the morning they are all back in the cage again. Zoe loves to play in mailing tubes (the kind for mailing posters). She will crawl into one, and Debbie and I will roll it back and forth between us until Zoe finally staggers out, shakes herself to reorient herself, and then scampers back into the tube for more. Once she crawled into a tube and I put another tube on the end. She crawled into that one, so I moved the first tube to the end of the second. She kept running, and I kept swapping the tubes; like the old cartoon where the train is running on two sections of track, and the crew keeps picking up the track from behind and moving it to the front. We kept this up until I was laughing so hard that I fell over, and Zoe just sat there looking at me from the end of a tube as if to say "Is the game over already?" Our favorite play activity is to spread an old towel on the floor between Debbie and me. The ferrets run into the middle of it, and then we pick up the ends and start shaking and bouncing it around. The weasels go absolutely crazy, bouncing around, chattering, wrestling with each other, and just generally acting silly. If they try to run out, we flip the edge of the towel up and try to keep them in; if they succeed in escaping, they race around the room attacking everything in sight and then run back into the towel. Sometimes we throw a squeeky toy in with them so they can fight over it. We have no idea why they enjoy this so much, but they have a great time and we love to watch them bounce around in the towel like furry ping-pong balls. The only problem we've had with our ferrets is that Debbie turned out to be allergic to them. If they licked her on the arms, she got a horrible rash, and any contact near her face made her eyes extremely swollen. We love the ferrets too much to give them up at this point, so we were looking everywhere for something to help. Finally, we have found a couple of things that seem to have gotten the problem under control. The first is a product called "Seal Skin". It's an aloe-based lotion that seals the skin while still letting it breathe, and it seems to have helped with the direct contact problem. The other product is "Allergy Relief: Animal Hair/Dander". It's a liquid that is taken sub-lingually (under the tongue). Debbie uses it a couple of times a day, and it seems to really work in preventing the rash and swelling. It also works on my cat allergy. The Allergy Relief product should be available in most health-food stores, under the trade name "bioAllers". We got the Seal Skin from a mail order catalog; I can look up the info on it if anyone's interested (send me private mail at [log in to unmask], and if there's enough interest I'll post the info to FML). Kurt and Debbie and Penny and Zoe -- ========================================================================== Kurt G. Schumacher Schumacher & Associates [log in to unmask] Boulder, CO ========================================================================== [Posted in FML issue 0510]