The story yesterday about the ferret encountering neighbor dogs reminded me of this experience I had last year with my ferret Zooey, who is an absolute HATER of dogs. Once last year she got out of my apartment, which had a cute little fenced yard attached to it. I didn't notice she was out until a couple minutes had past, at which time she was no longer in our yard. I ran around squeaking her favorite toy, but no Zooey. I heard a commotion in the neighbor's yard and went to investigate...there I found the neighbor's dog, a 60 lb-odd grey mutt of some sort, perfectly friendly, running around and around and around in circles being chased by...a 2 lb ferret. In retrospect the scene was sort of funny but at the time quite scary, for the dog had this look on its face that was slowly changing from confusion to annoyance. I managed to get Zooey's attention with the squeaky alligator and got her to run back under the fence to her own yard. No one lost any hair or body parts, everything turned out okay, though the dog's owner came out just after I had gotten Zooey over to her yard. He had heard the squeaking commotion and wanted to know what was going on...I showed him the ferret and explained she had just finished terrorizing his dog. He didn't look like he believed it, but I didn't want to prove it to him either so we went our separate ways, so to speak. Needless to say those two animals have not encountered each other since (and Zooey has not encountered another dog. She is quite happy with that). [Posted in FML issue 2850]