Belle, our 2.5 year old sable, got a new coat over about three weeks last month. It seemed a strange time to change coats, especially since it's her first complete coat change since she was a kit. She shed copious amounts of soft white undercoat, as well as the long dark guard hairs. She lost the guard hairs from her sides first, leaving her with a mohawk style hairdo, and looking VERY narrow. She also developed a white ring around the base of her tail, as the guard hairs that normally cover it were lost. Her tail did not shed noticeably. She is now pretty much grown back, just the same as before, with the addition of some white guard hairs on the hindquarters. Makes her look old and grizzled beyond her years. She HATES the snow and cold. We took her out a couple times, but she just high-tails (bottle-brush tails?) it back to the house, or sits shivering pathetically hunched by our boots. I relented quickly and put her inside my jacket, where she dug about for a bit, then climbed halfway down the sleeve. On another matter, I am amazed by other people's stories of how their fuzzies steal socks. Belle goes for the hard stuff: shoes. She is especially fond of my daughter's sneakers, and Joy frequently is running about the house looking for her shoes before the school bus comes. Copious applications of Bitter Apple have reduced the damage and disappearance rate, but once Belle dragged my husband's shoe all the way up the stairs. That shoe probably weighed twice what Belle weighs! And finally, my husband Richard has recently developed a fondness for root crops such as rutabagas and turnips, which is shared by Belle. Richard thinks this is because Belle's wild ancestors spent a lot of time digging around in tunnels, and sampling the roots they ran into there. Thus ferrets are not really carnivores, but are omnivorous. I think this is ridiculous: after all ferrets presumably never ran into grapevines in the wild, but they are inordinately fond of raisins. (Somewhere in this there is a story of how wild ferrets were first domesticated in the vineyards of Greece 3000 years ago, and the REAL reason California is afraid of them... :-)) Anyway, Richard asked me to ask if anyone else's fuzzies like root crops. Linda, Richard, Joy and Belle [Posted in FML issue 1098]