Dear Sharon Burbine, Pleased to read of the rescue of 2 ferrets. Would like to know precisely how these two lost ones were seized, presumably in darkness? Were the searchers using flashlights and looking for green-eye reflections? Did the ferret (s) come right up to the searcher, or was the ferret literally run down and snatched? Ferrets NorthWest FNW uses a method that works very well in recovering wandering ferrets, providing they have been in our shelter for several months, and the adopter keeps up the conditioning by use of the goose horn. Every day at LUMPS time, just as the tongue starts lapping up the soup and the little eyes squint (cute little tear forms in the apex) a goose horn is blown adjacent to the gulping ferret. The goose horn is actually a squeeze-bulb horn that you see on the handlebars of a kid's tricycle, 'cept the rubber bulb is long since gone, so the horn is blown by mouth. A finger in the bell of the horn can modulate the squawk so it sounds just like a double note gander. After a while, 2 to 3 months, the ferrets have associated the goose horn with their warm LUMPS, and like Pavlov's dog, they are conditioned - read alerted by - the squawk of the goose horn. We strongly encourage our adopters to continue this practice when they depart FNW with their Frettchen. After the ferret has wandered away by some misfortune or other human defect, and they are out and about for 6 to 10 hours and their bellies are empty, they respond positively to the sound of the goose horn. It is a very loud squawk and carries well. It is unusual in the normal environment compared to other sounds, and is a great tool for interesting the neighbors in just what the h..l your'e doing walking thru their shrubbery at night with your 5-cell 'coon flashlight playing you 2-tone miniature trumpet. The thought just came . . . Hey! Maybe we could add a ferret calling contest to our Ferret Frolics/Ferret Olympics we have out here on the Left coast twice yearly ! ! Oh, yeah, go ahead and ask me how we recovered a little Japanese ferret lost in the rugged Cascade mountains for an entire week. Boy, am I proud of that. Anybody else out there had any experiences in recovering a lost ferret? Please, sure like to hear from you. Edward Frettchenvergnuegen Lipinski, [Posted in FML issue 1818]