I just thougt I'd share our take on hissing. My husband plays with the ferrets a lot differenly than I do. In my mind he plays too rough, but the ferrets never seem to mind, and they come back for more. What he does is holds them and bites them on the back of the neck, where we would scruff them. He doesn't bite too hard, but enough for them to know what he's doing. The entire time he's doing this, they hiss like a windstorm, and sometimes if they get really mad at him, their tales bottlebrush. But as soon as he lets them go, they take off like a rocket, attacking everything in sight, and always come bouncing back at him biting his toes and taking off. Ours hiss out of frustration/anger, like the above situation, and they also hiss while playing and dooking. Other times, their hiss says "ENOUGH". We've learned to understand their "tone". So I just think its a way of expressing themselves however they are feeling at the moment. - Mish __MICHELLE Z. MATTA__________________________ Carnegie Mellon University......Athletic Dept [log in to unmask] http://www.andrew.cmu.edu/user/mish/home.html (Departmental)....http://www.cmu.edu/athletic _____________________________________________ [Posted in FML issue 1834]