One more ferret

Today I got myself one more ferret. A young, 11 weeks old, female who is not going to look like the others. She's light brown with white feet and nose and a yellow throat patch. She's also got eyes that reflect more red than green.

I think we did everything right when introducing her to the others. The breeder came over and I let her meet one at a time in the garden.

Rustan didn't mind her very much, he just took a good close look at her and then started wrestlin her, without using his teeth
Carmen, who I worried about didn't say or do much either
Natasja gave her a thourough shaking, twice, which seems to have given her respect for Natasja
Alison was scared and ran off across the lawn at high speed trailing the flex-lead

I started having misgivings at first when the breeder was startled to see I just opened the front door and let four ferrets stand there, as he thought they'd run off. Second misgiving was when he told me she'd gotten "bite training" and the first thing she did was to bite me! Now awfully hard, but certainly not nibbling either. Third misgiving was when we entered the house and he asked me how I could have "all this stuff" laying around with four ferrets, and didn't it get dirty having two buckets of earth in a cardboard box for them to play with?

All of this is natural to me, and if it isn't for him, I wonder what sort of upbringing she's had...

How to characterise her? She's a talker: All the time she's close to the other she makes noises. She's a climber and is the first one to have scaled the front of my loudspeakers and the cooling grid on the back of the freezer. All ferrets like to climb, but I'd expected her to wait a couple of hours at least before shooting for altitude. She bites. A lot. I've never had my hands as messed up by a ferret before. I've'd nails pierced by fangs, but that's been by mistake or by a sick ferret, so it doesn't count, really. She is large. Natasja's harness didn't fit her, and Carmen's, which is marginally larger hardly fits over her head (I usually don't open the front loops of the harnesses) and this in spite of her weighing less than 0.8 kg. (I think this wide head and her lower front teeth won't make it very meaningful entering her at shows.)

She didn't have a name when she came here. Her breeder always gives his kits "Beatles" names. He acted like he'd give her one too when he registers her and her siblings. I certainly don't like that kind of attitude, and since he doesn't own her anymore, I won't permit him to register her under any name whatsoever: She'll be registered as Roxane and nothing else. (He didn't give me the the ID numbers for her parents, so presumably I'll have to register her with "unknown" parents, until he sends in the papers for the others.) (As the price was to include the first distemper shot, but as she's too young for it, we'll have to see if I get a refund for the shot or not. Can become interesting.)

In the evening I took Natasja for a walk, where she proved to be more observant than me. Walking along the creek, she told me there was something on the other side. I looked and told her I saw a deer in the copse. Well, it looked a lot like a deer, which we have lots of around her. When I offered her to stalk the deer, she proposed crossing the creek, which I refused, so we took a bridge instead. While taking a detour around the fence, which now was mended, I realised it wasn't a deer at all, but of course a sheep! We approached through the woods and then I saw that it wasn't one, but a whole flock of sheep, only most of them were better camouflaged. Very fascinating for Natasja, who wanted to get close, but not too close.

During the afternoon, Roxane slept in my bed. In the evening she kept to the other ferrets, somewhat surprisingly sharing the transport cage with Carmen and Natasja. Rustan played a lot with her through the night, but preferred to sleep somewhere else.