Something Fishy by A M
May 27th, 2010 3:19 PMMy bait was a jingle bell and colorful mylar tassel, bought at the estate sale of a drag queen. My target was Sophia, a small brown ferret with an unending capacity for mischief and an ironic dearth of wisdom.
Sophie will follow this toy in circles almost endlessly, though sadly I don't have a video of this. She will also chomp down on the jingle bell so tenaciously that she can be completely lifted from the ground.
Her cagemate, Owl (not pictured), is both fatter and lazier, and cannot be caught in this manner. Sophie, on the other hand, will cling to the bell through the process of being lifted up, having pictures taken, being placed in my lap, and then being returned to the ground. She will then attempt to run off with the bell, apparently unaware that it is on a leash. This is an animal that once immersed her entire head in a cup of boiling hot tea (she was fine). I figure I have an even greater intellectual advantage over her than over actual fish. For one thing, despite her nominal status as a predator, on the one occasion that I introduced her to actual fish, the only one she injured was by accident. On the other hand, the fish hid in her shadow. It's a real race to the bottom.
Sophie's comment on the following minute-long video is: pM <7``ee 23
ds/
The target and the lure
Moments before she became interested.
Mid-strike
Most of my pictures of ferrets look substantially like this.
Hooked one!
Sophie clamps on like a bulldog.
Leaving the ground
It never fails to amuse me that this is possible.
Reelin' it in
Caught!
In my lap, still clinging to the bait.
One-minute movie.
Download FLV
Catch, release, and fail to catch again. The sound in the background is Oregon Public Broadcast: the segment is on pitcher plants.
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She's lucky she's so cute. She's an unrepentant thief, destroyer of worlds, Fruit Loop bandit, and all around tiny monster. Her full name is Pistis Sophia Troublemaker That's Not Yours LastName (she is actually my step-ferret, having been left behind when her mom went to MIT, since she had pair-bonded with Owl, The Good One).
On the plus side, she's been trained to ride shoulders and give kisses, and she makes very cute sounds when wrestling Owl.
I read online that some people give feeder goldfish to their ferrets for enrichment. So I went and got a dozen or so for Sophie and Owl, but probably mostly Sophie, since she likes water much more and also has 90% of the predatory instincts between the two of them. I put them in a baking pan in an inch or two of water, put it on the bathroom floor anticipating spillage, and plopped the ferrets down into it. As expected, Owl wanted nothing to do with this. Bathing him is like bathing a cat, he tries to climb out of the tub up my arms, which is uncomfortable. Sophie is more of a water creature; she is clearly closer to her otter cousins.
So Sophie stands in the pan. The fish, working from a sadly irrelevant instinct telling them that shadows are safe, huddle up underneath her. She accidentally steps on one, and it bleeds a bit, but this fails to catch her attention. Eventually, she decides that this is boring, and goes to investigate the trash can. I try again, once or twice, but to no avail. The ferrets are completely uninterested in the fishies. They go back in their cage, and I take the fish into the kitchen to put them out of all our misery with a sharp knife.
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