Greetings to all! My roomate and I are now the new, and first-time, owners of a cutey little ferret, whom we have dubbed "Riesling." She is a 6 week old female, sort of grey-coated, bought from a local pet store, and with all the appropriate shots, spay, descent, etc.. Before buying her we read the FAQ pretty thorougly and scanned rec.arts.pets, so we had a pretty good idea what was going on in the domain of ferrets (we've hit FAQs for everything now from ferrets to shortwave radios. Useful things, they :) ). Technically, my roomate is the owner of the ferret but we're both sharing in raising (?) it and I'm the net-geek, so things will be from my perspective. Also, let me preface my comments by noting that we have had Riesling for a grand total of 3 days so far. Both of us have a fair amount of experience with raising and relating to dogs, but nothing else, so a lot of how I comment on Riesling in my mind is compared to my experience with dogs. We have a very homey cage for Ries, with lots of soft, old clothing for her to make beds out of, a balcony and a ramp, and a comfy ol' hammock made of a pantleg from sweats. She seems to have taken to the cage rather well, and has rearranged the clothes as she has seen fit to create herself a lower level bedroom, and she uses the hammock fairly often, when she wants to be especially cute. So far, she has exhibit two behaviors which I am rather pleased about (as opposed to dogs). The first is her litter training. We didn't need to. I don't know what experiences she had to prior to purchase, but she has used her litter box from the first time until present with no slips. Even when she runs free she will return to the cage and the litter box when she needs to. Amazing! By the second day it was clear that she was not at all pleased with the idea of remaining caged permanently, as she bit and scratched at the cage incessently. We have since ferret-proofed the living room and allowed her to run free, with no problems. In fact, the second pleasant behavioral surprise was that we didn't need to track her down to get her back in the cage, she just returned there to go to sleep and we close the door. Sounds good, so far, right? Right. Well so now the two "problems." Perhaps I'm asking for too much too soon. The biggest problem is this -BITING. SHe bites! It hurts! We have tried being harsh with her, and she has gotten a bit better about it, but it is still very difficult, and scary, to try and pet or handle her for fear of a real bloodletter. When she runs free we try to play with her, but she just ends up hurting us so we lay off. Furthermore, she has a thing for feet. If you only have socks or are barefoot she will circle your feet and bite your toes, which is very irritating! We have an effective "NO", one that stops her from doing what she is doing, but she'll do it again later. And if you try to flick her nose of something she'll get pissed and try to bite you again. I'm not trying to paint her as a completely hostile little Hitler, she is not mean, per se, but she will get mad if you hit her when she's biting you. We have yet to find any treats that she will eat - she likes her Science Diet kitten growth formula just fine, but has rejected the human food we've tried for treats. So we're wondering what advice, if any, more experience ferret-ers might have for us, from "give it time" to "smack her hard" :), but the biting is getting rather frustrating, and a real disincentive to physically socialize with her. Keep in mind that I'm used to dogs, which are often so placid you can kick them in the head (not that I would!) and they'll just kiss you (at least the dogs I've known). I'm not sure how ferrets normally behave. Thanks for the info, I look forward to reading and watching the collected ferret wisdom on the FML. -Aaron p.s. About that NH Health Dept. thing - I never cease to be amazed at how much and how often misinformation and skewed information is thrust upon the public. In fact, watch the nightly news any given night. Oh, hey, in fact there's a new scandal if you hadn't heard. On PrimeTime Live last night they tried to tell us that supermarket food was being shortweighted in some big scam, pointing out that 150,000 out of 3 million packages came up shortweighted by 1-2 cents. Revolution! Just another use of illusory numbers on the numbed minds of the public. [Posted in FML issue 0772]