Diagnosis and Treatment

I think my diagnosis here is pretty self explanatory, considering her history. The main factor contributing to her behavior is her learned history,  Under the observation that she does not bite her previous owner or other ferrets,  and only bites strangers (me), I believe she is biting out of fear due to punishment or trauma because of her history of abuse. Because she only bites when I pick her up and doesn't seek me out and attack me, I also believe she is biting me to escape a situation which she sees as demanding, a situation that causes her anxiety and which she feels the need to escape.

Luckily, we can use behavior therapy to change this behavior. As i mentioned earlier, unfortunately I made the mistake of initially flooding her, using myself as the fear provoking stimuli. I thought it was possible that she would habituate to my contact and deem it non-threatening, and start ignoring it. My goal was also to show her that the behavior would not be rewarded (that if I picked her up and she bit me, I was not going to just let her down and reward her by letting her go free for playtime). Instead, the fear was so strong that she didn't become habituated to me and became sensitized to me, the fear provoking stimuli. As the day went on, she would bite me harder, and through more obstacles, by the end she was biting right through bitter spray on my hands and through scruffing.

So obviously, that didn't work. I'm really hoping that my attempt at sensitization didn't cause any trauma against me, and in the time that has passed it doesn't seem like it has. So I'm going to try a new approach now: habituation through shaping. I'm going to use very small steps until the point where she deems me non-threatening, and yes, I expect this to take a long time. I am going to avoid punishment or negative reinforcers for as long as possible, because they're results are usually short lived. If it comes to the point where I believe she is used to us and is still biting, I will rediagnose the behavior from there.

So as of now, shes almost been here for a week. I've avoided handling her when it's unnecessary, and when I do handle her I sometimes wear gloves. I also try to avoid sneaking up on her or surprising her in any way. I let her out of her cage for a lot of playtime, and I try to keep myself in the same room shes in so she can get used to my presence. I also have sometimes tried to position myself in narrow places (like hallways), where she has to be near me to get by. My goal here is to just get her used to her new home, and to get her accustomed to our movements, sounds, smells, etc.

I'll be updating this blog every Sunday, starting tomorrow,  with my progress. .

Day One

Meet Meeka! She is the lovely ferret you see here. She's an eight month old Silver Shetland who was bred here in Nova Scotia, by private breeders, and myself and my boyfriend, Grant adopted her three days ago. She's a very lovable girl who unfortunately has a serious behavior problem, and in this blog I'm going to chronicle our journey as we tackle this problem,

First of all, I'll give you some of her sad history, As I said, she was born to an extremely irresponsible private breeder here in Nova Scotia, who sold her without spaying, descenting or getting her needles. She was sold to someone who had no experience with ferrets and there she was abused very badly. I'm not entirely sure what the nature of the abuse was, but I know at the least she had been badly neglected. I bought her from a very nice lady in Halifax, Ms.A, who rescued her from that home. When she rescued her (and  I believe another four ferrets who were living there) she was very, very thin and had lost all her fur on the back end of her body. Needless to say, she was in very bad shape. And this was all by the time she was two months old. 

Ms.A got her all the proper operations and needles and spent a lot of time nursing her back to health. Meeka was very scarred of people, and was constantly biting (hard). Ms.A told me it was roughly another two months before she could gain her trust and Meeka stopped biting her. By then time she brought her to me, Meeka was so attached to her she was sleeping in her bed at night. She was great with the immediate family who lived in the house and their other pets, but she was still very aggressive towards strangers. Ms.A had to part with her because one of her kids developed a very bad allergy to ferrets, and thats how she came to me.

Her behavior problem is biting, and HARD! like, drawing blood hard. Before even formally diagnosing the problem, I made the mistake of going with my gut reaction and trying to habituate her to us. It resulted in my had looking like this, except bloodier:

This was a really stupid idea which may have unfortunately traumatized her even worse. I regret that, for many reasons, one being my mangled hand. 

I should note that her aggression problem is only directed towards humans, We have another ferret, a four year old girl named Marley (pictured below), which she gets along great with. They play constantly, and Meeka doesn't bite her any harder than ferrets normally do. This observation will lead to my diagnoses, which I feel is pretty obvious, but I will lay out for you in my next post.

(The cuteness that is Marley)

(Me, 15-20 years)