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Meet The Weasels

© Pam McInnis

When I read someone’s advice or suggestions, I always want to know how that person came to his or her conclusions. So before I offer further advice on ferrets, I figured it would be a good idea to share a glimpse of my life with weasels.

I met my first ferret as an eight-year-old girl. I was vacationing at my great-grandmother’s house, and we were relaxing on her front porch one evening. Her neighbor strolled up the walkway, and right away I noticed a slinky thing poking a furry nose over her shoulder.

"What’s that?" I asked Great-Grandma.

"A ferret," she said, as the neighbor held out the little animal for me to inspect. The ferret looked at me, then squirmed to be put down. Once on the closed-in porch, he began to bounce around in a wild motion that I'd later learn was the "weasel war dance." He clucked and dooked and bounced, much to my amusement.

I fell in love with ferrets that day, but my parents weren’t keen on adding one to our household. I never forgot that little weasel, and when I got married I began badgering my husband about getting one. He surprised me with a young silver girl, Callie, for our first wedding anniversary.

In the meantime, my sister began dating a boy who also had a ferret. He would bring Weaz over, and he and Callie would dance around my living room and then curl into a ball together to sleep. I learned that the boyfriend had little time to spend with Weaz, between working and spending his evenings at my sister's place, so I talked him into letting the ferret become Callie's permanent roomie.

Weaz wasn’t used to being handled, and the first night I had him he latched onto my nose with his teeth. That was how I learned that not all ferrets were as docile as my Callie-girl, and that some require a little time to get used to human hands.

A few months after Weaz had settled in, my husband Chris and I went shopping for ferret food and found a lone girl in a cramped pet store cage. Brooke came home with us that evening. Weaz and Callie adopted her immediately, and she spent her first night in my house with them curled around her protectively. Not knowing that we’d gotten Brooke, my mother and sister surprised me with another baby girl for my birthday.