Advice from the Ferretlady:
If you are a good "ferret parent," you will do lots of research
- read books, search the internet, talk to seasoned ferret owners, and ask your
vet every question under the sun. And you will read or hear a lot about
"ferretproofing" your home.
The first thing I'm going to say about ferretproofing your home
is -- DON'T DO IT.
Now, let me clarify that.
Articles on ferretproofing your home suggest that it is possible
to make your home completely or mostly safe for your ferrets. No matter
how careful you are, it is very difficult to make your ENTIRE home safe for your
fuzzies. So I won't tell you to ferretproof your home.
My best recommendation is for you to select
only one or two rooms in your house that you can designate as ferret play areas,
ferretproof those rooms, and then allow your ferrets free reign of ONLY those
rooms. And even those rooms might have hidden dangers, but it's certainly
better than giving them access to your entire house. My ferrets have a
very large cage they live in most of the time, and I have a ferret play room
that I've ensured is safe where they can free-roam for a period of time each
day.
See also my notes on
Ferret Housing.
The Ferret Room
In the ferret room, make sure there are no small objects on the floor that the
ferrets could swallow - pins, buttons, etc. Make sure they cannot get up
onto tables - if there's anything on the tables, there won't be after the
ferrets get up there!
Put newspaper or litter pans in all the
corners, or put a litter pan in one corner and bunched-up towels in the other
corners. Ferrets like to poop in corners, but they won't poop on something
that resembles a bed.
Put a water bowl in there so they can drink
after running around and working up a thirst. You might also put a small
bowl of food in there so they can snack a bit.
Tales from the Diary
of the Ferretlady:
I will tell you a few stories of my own
personal experience to prove how relentless and resourceful these creatures are.
And what a danger they can be to themselves!
A Ferret in the Foundation
During the first year that I ever owned a ferret, I went to spend a summer
weekend with friends, and I had brought my sable (my first ferret, and I had
only one at that time) for my friends' children to meet him and play with
him. I was staying in an area of the house that my friends sometimes
rented out to boarders. This area had its own kitchen.
We cordoned off the small kitchen as the ferret play area.
I thoroughly checked the room before deciding that it was safe enough to let
loose my little fuzzy. There appeared to be no holes in the floor.
The doors closed tightly in the jambs, and securely met the floor at the
threshold - in other words, there was not a space under the door where the
little guy might squeeze through. The kitchen appliances - a small frig
and stove - appeared to be smack up against the wall with no space behind them.
There were no electrical outlets where he could reach them. The kitchen
cabinets on floor level did not meet the back wall, but I checked behind them
carefully and saw that there were no holes in the floor. So even if the
ferret got behind the cabinets, there was nowhere for him to go.
The children and I played with the ferret for a while, then we
left him alone for a brief period so he could rest. I had brought a
carrier with a couple of towels in it to be his bed. I did not put him
back in the carrier - I just left him free in this contained area, but I assumed
he would go into the carrier to curl up and sleep.
When I returned to the kitchen a short time later, he was
nowhere to be found. I thought perhaps he had gone behind the cabinets,
but he was not there. I could not imagine where he could have gone.
Nothing looked undisturbed - the doors had remained closed, there was nothing
for him to climb on where he could have escaped over the barrier at the other
end of the room. I was mystified. And scared, of course.
I called and called him. He usually responded to me
calling him, but this time - nothing. I did hear a very faint scratching
sound coming from the general area of the cabinets, but even with flashlights, I
could not see him. I thought he was just being stubborn -- hiding from me
because he was enjoying our "game" of hide-and-seek, or that he was totally
occupied in exploring the cabinets (which were empty since my friends had no
tenant at the time) and that he was ignoring me.
I gave up, convinced that he was still in the kitchen (I could
hear the scratching, after all). I figured he would come out eventually.
So I went down to the basement of the house, which had been converted into an
office and joined my friends, who were doing some internet browsing.
I walked around the room, admiring the work they had done to
transform the basement into an office, when I heard the scratching again.
I thought that was odd. Why would I be hearing the scratching in the
basement? The ferret was supposed to still be in the kitchen, absorbed in
exploring the empty cabinets.
After walking around the basement office a bit, listening to the
sound, I finally realized that the scratching was coming from an area in the
vicinity of a grate in the wall. I went over to that grate and called the
ferret by name. All of a sudden, I saw some whiskers poking through the
grate.
I quickly asked my friends to bring a screwdriver. While
we worked on removing the grate, they explained that the basement did not run
the entire length or width of the house. The tenant area had been added on
later so there was no basement under the addition. The only thing under
the floor of the tenant area was dirt - and the foundation of the house.
We removed the grate from the wall and sure enough, the ferret
was in the narrow horizontal space (no more than a foot in height) where the
floor almost met the foundation.
Once I had recovered from my panic and had entered "relief and
diagnosis mode," I checked out the tenant kitchen again to see what I had
missed. I discovered the hole. A hole had been drilled into the
floor for the gas pipes to enter the kitchen, which carried fuel to the gas
oven/stove. While the hole was barely larger than the pipes themselves, it
was just big enough for a small ferret to squeeze its way in, and wind up under
the house.
So even when you THINK you have found a room that is secure, it
may not be.
Lesson Learned:
The only rooms in which I allow my ferrets free roaming these days are the
hallways, where there are no cabinets or appliances or other items behind which
there may be holes or places where they could get under the house, or get stuck
and suffocate.
Ferrets in the Ceiling
During my third year as a ferret owner, I had two sables that were growing
rapidly. It was a joy watching them grow, but, like many "mothers," I
wanted some babies in the house again. I brought home two babies (marked
whites) and reveled in watching two tiny fuzzies interact with the older "kids."
Once the babies were a little bit larger (about six months old),
I allowed them to free roam in one of my hallways with the bigger guys. I
had checked this hallway in the past and determined that it was secure. Or
so I thought. I lived in a three-story brownstone and the ferret hallway
was on the second floor. I left them alone for a while and went
downstairs.
Then I heard a scratching on the ceiling. I figured it was
the ferrets just trying to dig their way through the floor (a futile gesture, I
smirked!) or that they might just be scratching on the wall. But the
scratching didn't seem to be coming from a whole floor away. It actually
sounded like it was coming from the ceiling, from the hollow space between the
floor of the second story and the ceiling of the first story of the house.
I went upstairs, and of course, the baby ferrets were nowhere to
be found.
I had oil heat in the brownstone. The oil in the oil tank
was the fuel that heated water in a boiler in the basement, and pipes traveled
up from the basement to all the floors. Some of the pipes terminated at
radiators on each floor. This was how the house stayed toasty warm even in
Northeast winters.
Since the pipes ran all the way from the basement up to the
third floor, holes had been drilled in the ceiling and floor of each story.
The holes were just large enough for the pipes to pass through, but the house
was over a hundred years old, and in a state of some minor decay. On the
second floor, in the supposedly ferretproofed hallway, the hole around one pipe
was slightly larger, worn away with age by the footfalls of tenants crossing
that floor for decades upon decades.
It was through this tiny enlargement around the one pipe that
the babies had managed to worm their way into the space between the floors.
I finally coaxed them out - I could not even get my hand in that
hole, it was so small! So I had to tease them until they came out on their
own. And when they surfaced, those two little marked whites looked more
like chocolates! They were absolutely black from the dust and dirt
in that century-old crawlspace. I shudder to think what would have
happened if they had worked their way to the opposite end of the house and
fallen in a hole or something. I never would have been able to get them
out.
Lesson Learned:
Even in a hallway, check to make sure there are no holes in the floor.
Small ferrets can squeeze themselves into holes only a couple of inches in
diameter. And make sure the doors are flush with the floor when closed.
If the doors, when closed, have a gap of even just an inch between the bottom of
the door and the floor, ferrets can flatten themselves out and slide under.
A determined ferret can squeeze his entire slinky body (most of which has the
consistency of Jello) through a hole which is just big enough for his head to
get through. It may look like his back end is larger, but the head is the
only hard part that he has to get through - and then he's free! Free!
(Free to get lost or in trouble!)
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