I second Kathy Rich's endorsement of Simple Green. That and vinegar are the only cleaners that I use wherever there be ferrets. Francine put Simple Green's nontoxicity to the test last year. I was mopping the bathroom, and I guess the bucket full of dilute Simple Green looked like a BIG CUP to her (one of her nicknames is the Queen of Cups). Ironically, I was talking to a roommate about how SAFE Simple Green was (knowing just enough pharmacology from indexing medical books to be dangerous), and had my back turned to the bucket. I heard some scratching, but just thought it was one of the ferrets trying to get into a drawer somewhere. I turned around to dip the mop in the bucket, and there was Francine, with her back legs hooked over the side of the bucket, her front legs churning frantically to keep her head above the frothy solution, spluttering and coughing. I held her face under the sink faucet to flush her eyes, and then held her under the shower head and rinsed her thoroughly tip to tail. I bundled her up in a towel and called the vet. By now she was wheezing. I had the Simple Green bottle, and the cautions just said it was an eye irritant. We decided that the best thing to do was to give her some pediatric Benadryl cough syrup (the standard 0.5 ml or 1/8 tsp dose) and watch her breathing and her eyes. The Benadryl worked. I dosed her every 8 hours. The initial inflammation of her eyes passed almost immediately, but they watered some for the next 24 hours. Her wheezing would return at the end of the 8 hours for the next two days. Other than that, she came through okay ... and squeaky clean! The tragedy averted in this episode was drowning. After that, the ferrets go into their cage when I'm mopping. -- Lee [Posted in FML issue 1903]