Those little fuzzballs are Taz and Teddi, two of my pet ferrets. I adore them and they light my life at the darkest moments.  Taz was near-starving in a pet store when we found him; he had been taken from his mom and not weaned well and didn’t know how to eat the solid food he was being offered.  Teddi was a rescue, REALLY starving—all skin and bones and bloated belly like a little Somalian child.

Ferrets are an impulse purchase for a lot of folks.  And then, when they are tired of them, they are horribly neglected or abused.  These wonderful little predators (no, they are NOT rodents—they kill rodents) suffer malnutrition and worse by under educated owners who just buy them as cute kits at a Petco store.

They are like fur clad two year olds, able to get into any place they can push their heads into, they eat things that block their guts and die agonizing deaths without surgery to save them.  Over the years since 1999, I have owned fifteen ferrets—some purchased as the pets of my heart, and many rescues brought to me.  They don’t die good peaceful deaths.  Teddi, the smaller of the two above, will likely die of the results of something like human inflammatory bowel disease.  The starvation of her first five months of life has likely damaged her gut and as she ages it will bother her more.  The treatment for this is oral steroids; the problem is, those eventually cause gastric ulcers that will make her bleed to death.

They get adrenal cancer at terrible rates, sometimes a slow death and sometimes an incredibly fast one.  One of my ferrets didn’t even show the initial symptoms of hair loss before he went adrenal hormone aggressive, and then collapsed in less than three weeks.  The cancer went “sideways” and killed his bone marrow, leaving him with so few red blood cells that his nose turned white and he was not getting air to his muscles.  He  must have been in agony even though I called the vet as fast as I saw his  color change.

Ferrets also die of insulinoma—a cancer that makes insulin producing tumors.  Their blood sugar gets so low they go into a coma, or seizure.  My little old lady woozle, Sorcha, is dying of this now.  I feed her often, coaxing her to eat so she won’t suffer agony in seizures.  The treatment for this is steroids, too—or in a younger ferret, surgery to remove the many tiny tumors.  Sorcha is bleeding from the steroids and cannot have any more.  The vet is coming on Monday to end this losing battle.

Ferrets are wonderful pets for dedicated pet owners. Please do not buy that cute kit on impulse cause the kid is begging.  Please study up first.  It isn’t just the $99 sale price in money, either.  You need a good cage, a secure cage—because they can OPEn doors of cages.  A good cage costs at least $200.  Vet bills are in the catastrophic category—Sorcha would have died 4 years ago from adrenal cancer without a surgery that cost $1200.

I recommend as a minimum that you read the book “Ferrets for Dummies” before you even TOUCH a beguiling kit at Petco.   And if you do touch one, hold one, and it bites you HARD?  That does not mean it is a vicious little animal, it means it is HUNGRY and not adapting to whatever the pet store is offering.  People who don’t study up on ferrets and buy them end up needing someone like me, who has to try to save the animal….and sooner or later ends up crying over a tiny grave.

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