To All, I recently received an Email from a friend who works and lives in New York City; actually, he works for the city government. He was concerned about my wife and I having three ferrets as we are expecting our first baby this summer. Here is some of the Email that may concern you: "As you may know a great ferret debate rages in New York City (where it is illegal to keep a ferret!) the commissioner of health was mentioning it the other day and said that one of the reasons why she never rescinded the ban was that she had seen much evidence (100's of pictures) of infants that had been mauled by ferrets. Evidently, infants make sounds similar to those of a ferrets natural prey (?) and so there have been numerous cases of ferrets crawling into a baby's area and literally taking a hunk out of the kids face." I would have thought that this type of misinformation had faded away but obviously not. I emailed my friend about the similar fight and struggle in MA; which indeed reversed its ban on our fuzzy friends. I would appreciate some hard data; with sources if possible, to email my friend. Perhaps, I can indirectly get this information to the commissionor of health. Yes, I did mention how a baby is more likely to be "mauled" by a dog and that a baby should never be left alone and unsupervised with ANY animal. Thanks in advance, Bill and Sue Baker and Dugless, Dugina and Dugly [Posted in FML issue 1536]