Long before I ever moved into my current husband’s house, he’d covered one small wall with cork. It was dark brown, almost black, old, crumbling, and the ferrets were much too interested in it for their own good. The cats were using it as a scratching post, leaving little bits and pieces of cork lying around-the perfect size to tempt a ferret into picking them up, chewing on them and perhaps swallowing them. Since neither my husband nor I relished the thought of emergency surgery to remove an intestinal blockage in one of my overly curious ferrets, it became obvious we’d have to cover that cork.
My husband’s solution was to glue a chunk of carpet on the wall. He put up a shelf where the cats could eat their food in peace, unmolested by ferrets, and for a long time this arrangement worked just fine.
Then we got Moggie. Moggie was a little silver female, and young. We’d become complacent leaving our drinks on the end tables – our other ferrets were older and very sedate. Moggie changed all that. She knocked over drinks, chewed the buttons off the TV remote and, what’s more upsetting, learned she could climb the carpeted wall!
There was a desk sitting next to the wall, and for a while, she would merely scale the wall, get to the top of the desk, push off all the papers and the pen cup, get bored and jump down again.
Then we got Rosie. Rosie was a beautiful sable mitt female with all of Moggie’s intelligence and even more mischief. Rosie watched Moggie climb the wall and knock stuff off the desk. Rosie dodged falling pens and papers for a week or two, then she learned she could also scale the carpeted wall. At this point, we had two little female ferrets climbing the wall and cleaning off the desk like two furry, demented housekeepers. This was annoying, but amusing, too.
It was a little less amusing when two other ferrets followed suit. By this time, we’d given up putting much of anything on the desk and found a different, higher spot for our valuables.
A few weeks later, Moggie upped the ante. We came into the room one day to find her on the cat shelf, munching on forbidden cat food. (Adult cat food doesn’t have enough protein or fat for a ferret.) The cats weren’t happy with this situation, and when we came home to find ALL the ferrets on the cat shelf (and the cats sitting on the floor watching them), we decided it was time to take action.
My husband cleverly fashioned a shield to put up against the wall to prevent climbing. He bought a piece of Plexiglas, heated parts of it and bent it to fit the contour of this little wall. This worked quite well … for a while. Just about the time we thought we had them licked, Moggie upped the ante again.
She discovered a way to pull the plastic away from the wall on the lower right corner, insert herself into the space between the plastic and the carpeted wall, and climb diagonally over to the desk. Since this was very amusing, we didn’t do much about it. We’d already resigned ourselves to the desk being a ferret play toy, and life settled into a rhythm of letting the ferrets out to play, removing the cat food and putting it up higher, putting the ferrets away, putting the cat food back down, and letting the cats know the coast was clear.
Then Rosie figured it out, too. Rosie taught Pepper, Pepper taught Max, and Calvin … well, I think Calvin was directing the whole operation because the ferrets on the cat shelf would push off bits of cat food, and he’d stay on the floor and vacuum them up! This was still manageable, and the ferrets were having such a good time, that it became a regular ritual. The family started taking bets with visitors on how long it would take for the ferrets to achieve “Cat Shelf Height.” Life was good.
This time, Rosie upped the ante. She upped the ante really high! Literally.
As with most ferret-owned houses, there are very few places to put breakable nick-knacks and decorative items. So my husband had put up a small shelf that ran around the room, about a foot down from the ceiling. Various items ended up there … statues, candles, the big glass cake dish, a silver plated serving dish … just about anything that was breakable or “verboten” to ferrets.
One day while I was upstairs on the computer, I heard a loud crash. I was halfway down the stairs when I heard another even louder crash. That one had the unmistakable sound of shattering glass. As I hit the doorway, a ceramic dog hit the floor. While I jumped the gate, I could see Rosie peering over the edge of the shelf, surveying her recent experiments with gravity. By the time I got to that side of the room, she was well on her way to pushing off the 10-pound solid glass pedestal cake dish! The base was halfway over the edge when I snatched that little brown and white she-devil off the shelf.
Adrenaline must have played a part, because that shelf is normally beyond my reach. I was very motivated to stop further glass “crashage,” since the cake dish was very heavy and it would have done real damage to my body on the way down!
That little ferret had managed to destroy three of my five statues. A candle holder had escaped serious damage (there were a few tooth-holes in the candle), but I’m sure if the cake dish had landed on it, that would have bitten the dust, too.
After I gathered up the ferrets (the rest of whom were quite intelligently far away in another room, avoiding being beaned by Rosie’s breakable-fueled experiment with gravity), I cleaned up the mess and called my husband at work to inform him our latest attempt at ferret-proofing had failed miserably.
You never really finish ferret-proofing. You just temporarily get the upper hand.
