The Summer Palace

Now the weather is better, we've been cleaning out the shed/hutch/chicken run so that the ferrets can have more spacious accommodation. Today they were allowed supervised access, to see if all the mouse-and-rat holes had been sufficiently ferret-proofed.

This corner needs investigation...

...as does this one...

...and this one!

Do I fit through this hole?

If I climb up here...

...I can see how secure this lock is!

How about this corner?

Ferret FAQs and FIAs

Ferret FIAs (Frequently Incorrect Assumptions):

Ferrets are rodents

No, they’re not, no more than your pet cat is a rodent. They are mustelids, like badgers otters and weasels. Mice are omnivores with nibbling gnawing teeth, whereas ferrets are carnivores with biting flesh-slicing bone-crunching teeth. Just like a cat.

What do they eat?

Dried kibble, just like cat-biscuits (but with a higher protein content if you want to get technical about it). Also raw eggs, ham, kippers, the contents of unguarded steak sandwiches, corks, shoes, cream, frogs, bananas, mice, cat food, bits-of-string-that-taste-nice, slugs, snails, oxtail soup, strawberries and brussel sprouts. But not horseradish. It tastes nasty, apparently.

The fourth picture in this article (warning: Daily Mail link) is a ferret

Not exactly. Not a domestic ferret, anyway, which is what the article is about. It’s a Black-footed Ferret, an endangered species native to North America. It is about as relevant to this article as a picture of a Scottish wildcat is to the story of Boots The Amazing Stowaway Kitten Who Travelled 500 Miles. Possibly even less.

But aren’t they wild animals?

No, they’re domesticated, just like Mog and Hairy Maclary from Donaldson’s Dairy. They’ve been domesticated for thousands of years, have no sense of fear or self-preservation, and tend to die quite rapidly when left unsupervised in the Real World.

They chew though cables

No. At least, not that I’ve discovered. Rodents and lagomorphs (hey kids: rabbits aren’t rodents either!) chew cables, but ferrets don’t have nibbling gnawing teeth (see above). They do unplug cables, shred the carpet, dig up houseplants, knock over tea, chew shoes, steal corks, empty cupboards, poop under the bed, sleep in my sock drawer and attack the cats, but in the ten years I’ve been keeping them they’ve never chewed through cables.

Do they have freedom to run around the house?

No (see above). They are allowed out of their cage under close supervision each evening, followed by fifteen minutes of clearing up afterwards.

They smell, don’t they?

Well, yes, inasmuch as all animals and humans have a “smell”. It’s not a pungent nasty smell unless you never empty the litter tray or you startle them. Personally I find ferret-smell less objectionable than dog-smell or Lynx body-spray, but your opinion may differ.

Do they bite?

Well, it’s complicated. Ferrets are very scent-oriented creatures, so if you’ve just eaten a burger or painted your nails then your hands will smell of food or exciting paint, which will need Investigating. And the way ferrets Investigate things is often to pick it up in their mouths. Also, ferrets are incredibly playful, and a good way of inciting a game is to run up to your friend and give them a nip of the teeth to get their attention. Or sometimes a human might be wearing a sock that really MUST be added to the secret sock stash under the bed, so you pick it up in your jaws and try and carry it off and wonder why the screaming starts when you get a mouthful of toe as well.

Ferrets are like any other animal: it depends how well they have been socialised. In the past I’ve owned ferrets which were 100% guaranteed not to bite, and have confidently left them being played with by toddlers. I’ve also rehabilitated a mistreated ferret who had learned that biting any human within reach was a good survival mechanism. My current crew are not entirely trustworthy enough to be left alone with a child, but with supervision they’re fine. They’ll never exactly bite, but they may just give an entirely predictable (if you know what to look out for) sharp nip every now and again. But it’s never malicious, just curious.

Are you sure they’re not rodents?

Yes.

Why do you keep them?

It seemed a good idea at the time.

Ferrets with lumps on

Eth has had a busy spring. First there was the scab on his leg which looked a bit like a wart, and a bit like a bite-mark that wouldn't heal. Off we went to the vets, who took a needle biopsy, sent some cells off to a lab who came back with the results that it was probably a Sarcoma, very dangerous, and had to be excised at once.

So that was done, and fortunately the tumour was removed with a clear margin and sent off to the lab who said "Oh, now we can see the whole thing, it's actually a Mast Cell Tumour, pretty benign actually." This was a relief.

Three weeks later, I spotted another lump - this time on Eth's side. It was big and black and the size of a pea, just under the skin:

The vets were worried - the pigmentation made them think "melanoma", but the size of it and the rapidity of the growth made them not want to have to wait another ten days for biopsy results. So back to the surgery with Eth, more general anaesthetic and shaving later, and the lump was removed. This one, according to the Lab Results, was an Apocrine Tumour - again, relatively benign, but good to remove. Since there are remarkably few pictures of Apocrine Tumours in ferrets on the internet, I feel I have contributed.

Too darn hot!

Especially if one is clad in a fur coat, then it's far too hot to sleep in the usual pile of blankies and other ferrets.

Now I just need to persuade the cats that they don't need to be sitting on my lap on a day like this.

New toy!

The cats have a mad-cat-lady bed-affixed-to-the-radiator! It is warm and snuggly and out-of-ferret-range.

Unfortunately, by the time I've got the correct lens on the camera, worked out the settings on my new toy (the flash), set up everything else, the repeated test flashes have woken the mog who then looks more "peeved" than "cute".

Oh well!

That's what friends are for

 My friend Charlotte is a far better photographer than me, so I asked her to show me how to use my new flash (I may have bribed her with vasty quantities of curry). So she came over, carrying large amounts of camera paraphanalia.

Having helped me with some of the basics ("here is where you adjust the flash compensation in the camera; here is where you adjust it in the flash"), she then proceeded to set up three or four flashes, plus a lens that looked like she'd nicked it from the Hubble Space telescope. At this point, I decided not to compete with my own snaps, and merely watched.

She did produce some remarkably good shots.

 

...and then one of the ferts nicked her phone and we had to spend a while hunting for it until it was located in the bottom of the wardrobe...

More of Charlotte's picures here.

Moving - very much moving - Pictures

The following (admittedly poor quality) video demonstrates typical ferret behaviour:

I think this explains why 95% of the photos I take of the mustelids are out of focus, or, in extreme cases, contain no mustelids whatsoever!

Mugshots

The Evidence

 

 The suspects

Name: þ, aka “Thorn”, aka “Badger” (for his size), aka “Duracell ferret” (because he just keeps on going).

Likes: Food. Cat food. Running around, Jumping on other ferrets and kicking ‘em inna head. More cat food. Digging up houseplants.

Mmm, catfood!

Dislikes: Scary things (not sure what they are, but every so often he’ll hide under the bed and have a freak-out-episode). Baths.

Notable achievements to date: clambering on to the windowsill, and emptying two potted amaryllis bulbs and a full watering can over a stereo and a stack of forty CDs.

  

Name: ð, aka “Eth”, aka “Scrags”, aka “Get off me!”

Likes: Socks (especially when on the foot). Chewing things. Kitty milk. Corks. Chewing Thorn. The sock drawer. Stealing Wiimote covers and stashing them in the sock drawer.

Dislikes: Having corks, feet, Thorn, and other chew-toys confiscated.

Notable achievements to date: Removing the scroll-wheel from a mouse, and the buttons from a remote control.

Name: The Honourable Kitty Packenham, aka “Kitty”, aka “little madam”, aka "One-eye", aka “No!”

Likes: Jumping up and down onna bed. Playing hide-n-seek under the duvet. Jingly balls. Chasing the cats. Getting inside the sofa and slowly destroying it from within. Biting people who are playing with her. Sleeping in her penthouse hammock at the top of the cage where the Boys rarely go.

Dislikes: Being removed from the sofa and told-off. Being kicked inna head by Thorn.

Notable achievements to date: It’s a tie: either it’s having an eye gouged out by a cat and still not learning to keep away from them, or it was losing a fight to a box of miracle-gro and having bright blue feet for two days.

Duck Soup - a food for convalesent British ferrets

Most ferret-keepers have some equivalent of "Duck Soup" - a high-fat, high-protein soft food to be given to ferrets who are ill or recovering. The only thing these recipes have in common is that they contain no duck...
 

All the recipes I was able to find online were American, and contained brand-names I'd never heard of, units I couldn't deal with (I can never remember how much is "a cup"), and occasionally contained things like sugary caffeinated drinks, which didn't seem a good idea for a species prone to diabetes and insulinomas. Not to mention all the recipes with homoeopathic tablets in them!

In the interests of information, here's a British recipe, with none of the above problems:

Ingredients

About 250g of dried ferret kibble (mine eat the James Wellbeloved stuff)

1 pack of chicken livers - about 300-400g, I guess

2 tablespoons butter

2 tablespoons cheap cod-liver-oil (the cheapest you can find - it'll be 50% sunflower oil, and really pungent)

Method

1. Soak the kibble in an equal volume of water, until it is completely mushy - about 6 hours for cold water, at least 2 hours for hot water.

2. Melt the butter in a pan, and gently fry the chicken livers until lightly brown on the outside, but still pink inside.

3. Put everything - kibble, butter, livers, cod-liver-oil - in a food processor, and blend until smooth. It will look like chocolate mousse.

4. Feed to poorly ferret.With a syringe if necessary.

This will only keep for a couple of days, even in the fridge, so I usually freeze it in ice-cube trays, and then defrost a few lumps (about 5-10 seconds per lump in the microwave) as and when needed.

Despite multiple terminal conditions, Wellesley lived a happy six months or so on this diet, and I doubt he'd have lasted so long otherwise. I'm currently feeding ð on a pot of duck soup (made for Wellesley) I found in the bottom of the freezer, since he could do with putting on a bit of weight. He seems to like it.

Wellesley, enjoying life

Weasels are *not* weasily photographed!

We've had the Boys (þ and ð) for two weeks now. So far, they have destroyed one swimming hand-paddle and a Kurt Geiger shoe of which I had been somewhat fond, chewed the scrolly-wheel off a computer mouse, and stolen a waterproof phone case, the rubber Wiimote covers (we call them "Wii condoms") and the nose-piece off my M-frames. I've still not found everything. On the plus side, three ferrets bouncing on my laptop seems to have triggered the charger to start working, so it's not all bad!

I've been trying to photograph them. Ferrets are a tricky subject matter: they are fast-moving, so will inevitably be blurry, out-of-focus, or in a different environment to the one you just set your camera for.

White balance? What white balance?

 They are crepuscular, which is a posh way of saying that they are most active when it's gloomy (or under the bed) and you can't use a low-light lens because of the shutter speed you need to prevent motion blur.

POING!

Note ð's cartoon legs as he attempts to knock the stuffing out of þ

 Finally, they like to Take An Interest.

I think the best solution is to wait for them to get tired.