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)