From:
"- Z -"
Date: 2003-05-07 21:04:43 UTC
Subject: Re: [ferrethealth] stress from move? and also gross ears
To: ferrethealth@smartgroups.com
Message-ID: <Sea2-F29EB4HGXAwxXS00007b42@hotmail.com>
Kim wrote:
>Anyone have any ideas of why he is having such anxiety about getting out of
>his cage so early in the >morning? any ideas on how to stop him from doing
>this? In my dorm, he slept every morning until >somebody woke up, so this
>is very strange. He has done it in the past any time we're anyplace but
> >my dorm.
Well, speaking as somebody who just moved as well--my guys have been 1)
powerfully driven to intesively explore their new environment and 2) very
clingy since the move. Ferrets are such curious creatures that 1 should
come as no surprise. Monet probably knew everything there was to know about
your dorm room, and so he had no big desire to go exploring it on his own,
preferring to interact with people instead. Now that he's in a new place,
well, he just _needs_ to find out everything he can about it, seeing as how
he is a ferret and all :-) The only way to "stop" him from the cage banging
is to give him the time to explore and make sure that he is getting plenty
of out of cage time. It's fine not to give in to him when he's making
noise, because of course you don't want to let him think he's trained you to
let him out when he's noisy, but he may need more time out of the cage.
With regard to the crawling under the covers and biting your ankles--have
you tried just hugging him until he's wiggling to get away from you when he
does this? I find that tends to make a busy ferret not want to be near you
in the early hours of the morning ;-)
Also as somebody else pointed out, he may be used to getting a lot more
human attention than he may be getting now, or at least used to a lot more
activity and stimuli that would make him more tired. That combined with
the clingy-ness that I noticed in my own guys may also be the cause of some
of the behavior--he's asking for attention. I've also had the experience of
moving with ferrets from a larger apartment with more going on to one room
in my parents' house and I know that it can be difficult to arrange things.
But do see if you can find a way for him to get in some good quality
exploring time, and if you can tolerate being woken up a few times by the
ankle-biting, you may find he gets bored with it and moves on to other
things. Good luck!
Regina (and Pan and Seti, intrepid investigators extraordinaire)
Regina Harrison regina_z@hotmail.com or regina@channel1.com
http://www.channel1.com/users/regina/
blog: http://www.channel1.com/users/regina/zblog.html
Is that my business? Well, what is my business? Do I know? Did I ever
know? Lets not go into that. Youre not human tonight, Marlowe. Maybe I
never was or ever will be... Maybe we all get like this in the cold
half-lit world where always the wrong thing happens and never the right.
--Raymond Chandler, The Little Sister
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