Subject: Time: 10:55 AM OFFICE MEMO Keeping your ferret/fan undented Date: 11/21/94 Kristen, As a longtime fuzzy owner, I have had to try to figure all sorts of ways to keep the fuzzies out of/off of/away from things that they ought not to be in/on/eating/destroying. The following methods are listed, complete with their advantages/drawbacks. 1. Hired armed guard. This worked beautifully for about a week. Unfortunately, along with being expensive, the fuzzies started tactical maneuvers, misdirecting him with squeaky toys while others did an end-around straight to the potted plants. Shortly thereafter, they began frontal attacks. They took his gun, his baton, his cuffs (which they liked to play with), and, of course, they took his socks. He left later that day, a beaten man. The last we heard he had taken a job guarding very old people in a rest home. 2. Get a cat. We acquired Petey, The One-Eyed Cat, and hoped that Petey (a girl) would solve the problem. We found Petey the next morning, trussed up in the middle of the kitchen floor like a calf at a rodeo, three legs tied up in the air and the rope knotted with a flourish. The plants, once again, were goners. We put the usual yellow crime-scene ribbon around the incident of the foul, and gamely plodded ahead. Petey was flown to Kittytrauma, and is recovering. 3. Install large Plexiglass partitions, just like they have in many banks today. Problems: cost prohibitive, installation difficult, makes use of house problematic, probably ineffectual. If it doesn't do much for some of the desperate bank robbers, did anyone really think that it was going to stop a much more determined (and better-equipped) creature? 4. 1x2 welded wire or hardware cloth, in combination with duct tape ("duck tape" according to Garrison Keillor). Cheap, relatively easy to install, allows air to flow through (important in refrigerator applications), stops 'em cold. Carefully placed around the tops of large potted plants, will frustrate even determined ferrets. The only major drawback is unavoidable: being blocked off from familiar haunts (or from things that they are used to being able to destroy), they WILL find something else to ravage. Make a serious push on crime in the inner city, and it moves outward to the suburbs. Ferret-trouble sort of follows this giant amoeba theory; push in here, trouble pops out there. BE VIGILANT! Get the whole neighborhood involved. Ferret troublemaking is not a localized problem. Contact your Congressperson ("A what? Never heard of it"). Good luck with it, and all that. Stu, Carla, Wuzzy the Terror, Petey the One-Eyed Cat, Celia the Guinea Pig ("what do you mean, 'low order on the food chain' "?) [Posted in FML issue 1021]