Ferrets make surprisigly good pets (Ferrets)

Member Name: worst_trip

Product:	Ferrets
Date:	09/07/09 (182 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Ferrets make wonderful, charming, interesting, amusing and attractively ideal pets

Disadvantages: Sadly ferrets remain slightly obscure animals that many vets still have little idea how to deal with

If you want to keep a pet, traditionally bad press that these charming little animals have received aside, ferrets must come pretty high up on any rational person's list of ideal companion animals.

They are easily tamed and affectionate creatures, very playful, and will engage their owners in all sorts of amusing antics. Ferrets actually make a funny little 'chuckling' noise while at play, a really nice, idiosyncratic quirk which - since everyone seems obsessed with the stereotypical and usually false image of a ferret biting and hanging on - for some reason, you very rarely hear about.

Their housing requirements are very flexible; they can be kept loose in the house like a domestic cat or dog, the only slight drawback to 'free-range' indoor ferrets being their small size; though ferrets are sexually dimorphic, with males being up a third larger than the smaller females, even the biggest of males isn't likely to exceed more than a couple of kilogrammes in weight. Being relatively small ferrets are vulnerable to be trod on or shut in closing doors. If given several hours of exercise out of the cage each day, in the house or garden or even taken for a walk on a leash, ferrets can be housed in indoor or outdoor hutches. While they can spend a large proportion of each day asleep, it is preferable to keep them in a cage with an attached outdoor run - some ferret keepers use a sturdily-built avairy set-up to give their pets lots of opportunities for exercise. Any housing for ferrets needs to be thoroughly escape-proof; these animals have long, narrow bodies and can fit themselves through surprisingly small gaps. Escaped ferrets unfortunately have absolutely no sense of direction whatsoever, and if they get out tend to wander off in a straight line, without ever turning back. A lot of these animals end up at RSPCA and PDSA animal shelters (especially during the summer); this is always a potential source of pet ferrets if you are having trouble locating one.

They are naturally house-trained; being animals that use 'latrines' ferrets alway defecate and urinate in the same site - a corner of the cage for hutch-kept animals, or a secluded spot in the house if indoors. Once your ferret has 'selected' its own latrine site it's easy enough to put old newspaper or a cat litter tray there for it to use. The droppings of a healthy ferret are produced in compact black, twisted pellets and have a faint musky odour. The infamous 'bad smell' of a ferret may refer to a defensive technique they have at their disposal: like the North American skunk, ferrets can produce an unpleasant acrid odour from their anal glands, which when directed at a predator is intended to dissuade the larger animal from attack. The smell of this secretion is a bit like badly burnt toast, and unlike the skunk smell, it soon disappates. Personally I kept ferrets for years and only encountered this defence mechanism on a handful of occasions - when our ferrets were threatened by our neighbour's dogs.

It is sadly true that ferrets do possess a noticeable body odour, which will tend to linger on the animals themselves, their bedding and on the clothing of any person who's had prolonged ferret-contact. Some people find this quite offensive; others liken it to a musky or even honey-like aroma. The smell is much stronger in males than it is in females. When stale, and at its worst, I would liken this odour to the smell of dried-out sweaty socks, but even then it's not especially overpowering, and it's certainly no worse than (and I would say, orders of magnitude preferable to) the smell of a unwashed dirty dog. I have heard of people bathing their pet ferrets - which does remove the odour temporarily, but because this is the natural smell of a ferret, and something you can't get away from, this is only works as a short-term solution.

The major problem with keeping ferrets relates to the female animals - called 'jills'. Ferrets have a slightly unusual quirk of the female reproduction system - an arrangement that presumably works very well for their wild ancestor the European polecat, a solitary animal that lives at low population densities in the wild. Female ferrets (and polecats) are so-called 'induced ovulators;' that is they come into mating condition (oestrus) in late summer / early spring but don't release an egg until the time of mating. This ensures that in widely-spaced populations, the chances of an egg being fertilized are maximised. The problem with this is that unmated female ferrets remain in oestrous condition all through the summer till decreasing day length (or increasing night length) gives them the cue, in autumn, to come out of reproductive condition again. A prolonged oestrous period has a number of health problems for jills associated with it; firstly the risk of bacterial infection of the female reproductive tract (a female ferret's external genitalia swell to an alarming size during oestrus, and produce various secretions that are an ideal medium for bacterial growth at this time), and secondly there is a risk of unmated females being affected by a form of leukaemia, brought on by prolonged exposure to female reproductive hormones at the time of oestrus.

The most straight-forward solution to this health problem, assuming you have a pet female ferret and don't want her to breed every year, is to have her spayed. Alternatively there is a hormone injection that can be administered by vets that will end oestrus - this may cause the ferret to experience a 'phantom pregnancy' but though her behaviour may become a little altered during this time, she will soon recover.

The problem with both these potential solutions I've found myself is that very few British vets have any experience whatsoever in treating ferrets. These animals seem traditionally to have been regarded effectively as 'disposable' by a substantial proportion of ferret keepers, which means that vet fees are seen as a waste of money, and thus, though ferrets are very widely kept in Britain, surprisingly few vets ever encounter them. With the slowly increasing popularity of ferrets as pet animals this situation may happily be changing, however.

The hormone injection vets commonly give to female dogs to bring them out of oestrus absolutely isn't suitable for ferrets: it may work on ferrets temporarily but the effect soon wears off and oestrus - which if prolonged still carries its associated health risks - will be resumed. If you are lucky enough to find a vet who is familiar with ferrets or similar mustelids (a local vet we eventually found who knew his stuff regarding ferrets got his experience from treating American mink, a similar species, at a fur farm) there is a suitable hormone or cocktail of hormones that can be supplied once a year to bring females out of oestrus effectively.

In terms of necessary vaccinations, ferrets are also highly susceptible to (amongst other diseases) canine distemper, often lethal to ferrets, which they can catch from contact with unvaccinated dogs and dog faeces. Ferrets that are likely to come into contact with dogs or dog excrement should thus be immunized against the disease. Again, there is a vaccine that can be administered to ferrets to protect them from canine distemper, but once again, the form of vaccine given to dogs CANNOT be used on ferrets (the vaccine given to dogs is produced from ferret bodily fluids and while non-dangerous to dogs, a ferret-body-fluid-based vaccine will infect ferrets with the very disease the immunization seeks to prevent).

There is an excellent book - 'The Complete Book of Ferrets' by Val Porter and Nick Brown that you should look out for if you want to learn more about keeping ferrets. I haven't really addressed their recommended diet (meat-based for preference) at all or nearly all of the health and housing issues in this brief review. The Porter & Brown book is a comprehensive, sensible and very well written guide, packed with useful as well as some slightly more technical information on ferret-keeping, and I can't recommend it highly enough.

As to ferrets 'in the family' I've noted two basic responses that people have to them: either they like them immediately from the outset (as I think any sensible person would) or - they just (perhaps irrationally) don't. My sister, for example had next to no truck with the ferrets I kept during my teens, while my mother became - quite unexpectedly - an avid fan from the first moment they arrived. I saw these differing attitudes replicated by many of the friends and neighbours of ours who encountered them. Regarding ferrets as potential pets for children, I'd have no hesitation in recommending a tame ferret as a pet for any responsible child or young adult. In fact the first pet animal my own daughter encountered at about nine months old was a tame ferret at a country fair.

As for the biting thing - while it is true that ferrets are physiologically capable of 'locking' their jaws when they bite down so that they can't be dislodged, I have never, ever, seen this for myself, and I kept pet ferrets - one of them a 'rescue' animal who hadn't even been tamed by me - for years. Admittedly I did get the odd slashing scratch (after all, these animals don't possess retractable claws) and minor nip, but nothing at all, compared to what a pet cat intent on scratching you could inflict; and if we're discussing potentially dangerous pets, while I imagine being seriously bitten by a ferret would certainly be unpleasant, I would doubt that even the most damage-intent ferret is really capable of inflicting anyone with more than one (or at worst, a series of) very nasty bites, due to the small size of these animals in the first place.

What can I say. I think they're great, and get my 'best pet ever' vote any day.

Summary: Ferrets make better pets than cats, dogs, goldfish, budgies, hamsters, gerbils etc. etc.etc