Fertbert would (of course) be an embezzler whose personality was just so mesmeric that no one would ever fire him. Steve is very allergic to the musk of whole males, but not at all allergic to other ferrets. People vary. Candy, you can read about Juvenile Lymphoma in the Lymphoma FAQs. (ALL the FAQs come highly recommended.) JL is a disease which rapidly savages through a kit; it was the single worst ferret disease experience we ever went through. Fortunately, it is mercifully rare. Niki, Many years ago Meltdown was quite like your little one. Turned out that she had a secondary fungal infection; all was fine once that was treated. K, do NOT know if it is true (Bob will be the one who will have the references, just as he has the references which show that there is NOT substantive evidence of ferrets having actually been domesticated first in Egypt.) but have read that ferrets were ineffective here for obtaining rabbits since the NW ones they encountered tended to have widely distributed separate family burrows, rather than large and interconnected warrens. (Of course, Beth LIVES in Warren, so maybe there are or have been ones (bad joke); I'm NOT into Leptera.) Still, this might be an important direction for you to look when writing about the history of ferrets vs. terriers as rabbit hunting companions. Actual mental impairment is very rare in ferrets. We used to keep track of cases since Ruffle had that difficulty among her others. In her case it appeared to be genetic. The other cases we know of traced back to early fevers. Ruffle was never-the-less trainable, but what took weeks for others would take years for her. She was very frustrated by her lack of understanding, and it took three years for her to realize that words (even ones such as "raisin", tube-treat", and "treat", and her name) meant anything. This meant that she bit often and badly for her first three years and never again afterward, when things made a bit of sense and she knew that we would look at her reactions to words and respond to her reactions. She required extra, extra gentleness and kindness -- even more than the abuse victims we've known. She was also completely worth it. Someone (Barb, was it you?) had one who suffered a high fever and afterward was a very gentle teddybear but very mentally slow. The other two cases we heard of both bit very badly after their early high fevers and those who had them cared for them but did not risk doing the extensive interactions we used -- never heard of any improvement for them. Sukie [Posted in FML issue 1869]