Question: Please tell me about your ferrets

Joanna Cruden answered on 18 Jun 2012:

Ferrets are really adorable animals to work with, they are very responsive, I don’t work with them anymore but before I started working here I had worked with them for about 18 years in total!

I miss working with them but I have lots of great memories, we used to let them out every day for playtime, which meant that we could be in a large room and put lots of things on the floor for the ferrets to play in, like a water bath which they loved to jump in and splash about, they had climbing frames and tunnels which they could not resist running in. They make excited noises when they are playing, maybe a little ferret laughter! We used to have them in huge floor pens and could put large cardboard boxes in them full of sawdust for them to burrow and nest in, we throw forage hard nuggets for them to find and ferrets naturally hide their food so they can find it later when they are hungry so they used to find the nuggets, move them and hide them!

Male ferrets are aggressive towards each other during the breeding season and usually have to be separated but with patience they can be re-grouped. Females are usually fine in a group. Even adult ferrets are like puppies, they never seem to stop wanting to play and that is why they make such great pets. Working with such enriched playful ferrets made it very hard for me to see them in the sealed cages they had to live in when we moved to containment level 3 work but with a great deal of support from the researchers I was able to demonstrate through preference testing that ferrets had a strong preference to an enriched environment and we were able to find items to put in the cages which could be incinerated after they had been used. Ferrets do get tame and don’t bite except in excitement or if they are not used to being handled. While the laboratory ferret will be put to sleep at the end of its experiment we gave them as good a life as we could in the lab. When I first started working with ferrets we had animals that were around for a couple of years and they were so tame, they will chase cat toys about and we gave them treats like Ferretone when they were good.

They really do like to dig and were really rewarding to work with. I do miss them but I know I have helped change the lives of some of the ferrets kept in high containment which makes me feel like I have achieved something for them