To: The Subscribers of the Ferret Mailing List From: Her Grace, The Princess Tiger Lilly Dear Patrons of this Electronic Rebounding Epistle: We generally do not write to public posting places. However, our senses have simply been overset by all the general happenings of recent days. Such dreadful postings. Such dreadful sniping and arguing. We Are Not Amused. Grammatically incorrect ferret speak, we expect. But humans should know better. It is unfortunate, but we feel that we must respond. A Royal's duty and obligations, however distasteful, must be addressed. So we shall try. For those who do not know, we are Her Grace, The Princess Tiger Lilly, of the ferret species, although on a somewhat higher level. We are the most delicate of chocolate mitts and quite lovely and silky. Modesty is a virtue. We are queen of our domain and all of our subjects do receive proper training and education at our paws. We were recently distressed to hear that kits who had gone to live with Gina and Paleface were not following proper toilet habits. We were gratified to read a recent post that the problem had been resolved. Those corner litter boxes are quite confusing to our young, and quite understandable that they would not know which corner to use. But of course they are male and we have noted that all males, in general, feel that if they eliminate anywhere close to the facility, they have done well. Now, we must remark on the ferrets who use baby talk when writing. We feel that if they have mastered the computer, as we have, that this should be lauded. Many humans have difficulty with this including our own human. She, by the way, has not had time to write in quite a while due to all the infants in the house. Our female subjects have been extremely busy reproducing. We have babies everywhere. It is quite distressing. Now this has been going on since March and while many of our young subjects have gone to new homes, we still have many young ones to train. A Royal is ever so busy. But I digress. Although the baby talking ferrets would probably think a dangling participle was a toy, we feel they should have their say. Certainly they make as much sense as some of the humans who herein submit daily opinions. We therefore call a close to this topic. And for those who would correct our grammatical errors. Know beforehand that We Would Not Be Amused. Since the time grows late, we must make haste to oversee our human in nightly toils of cleaning cages of the young, preparing mush, and all the other endless work that breeders subject themselves to. Well, all right, so we dangled. We will comment that we do have some lovely infants; champagne cinnamons, chocolates, mitts and an albino. Our human was quite amused to see so many albinos appear in litters this year. She has inherited the Albino Queen title. Even our blacks produced albinos. Ever so amusing. Recessive genes and all that. Gracious. We are also proud to announce that we have succeeded in cracking the genetic code to produce black sable mitts with black noses. We are waiting to see if we will be able to do it again. Our human says "Kits are not like a box of chocolates. You never know what you will get until they are at least 5 weeks old". We bid you a good day. Sincerely, The Princess Tiger Lilly [Posted in FML issue 1616]