Someone contacted me via my site this morning to tell me to check the Liverpool Leader, as there was a “really terrible story” about Mister the ferret in it.
I confess I was not keen to google the article as I didn’t think I wanted to start my day with a horrible story about a ferret but I thought I had better check it out.
Apparently
a teenager in Hinchinbrook, NSW, got a ferret, called Mister, this January as an early birthday present but last month Mister escaped from their backyard and went walkabout. Being a responsible ferret owner, flyers were put up all over the neighbourhood and that same day, someone calls up to ask what the reward was for returning Mister to them.
The mother told this character that she’d give him $50 and the sleaze said that he would have to speak to his children about that because they had grown attached to the ferret! The mother quite rightly told this guy he had no right to hold onto the ferret but the guy hung up and didn’t call back.
Now, about 3 weeks later,
the poor family get a call from some woman who claimed that she “chopped up” Mister and put him in a soup! When the mother pleaded with her to return Mister to the family, the woman became abusive, told her it was too late and hung up.
What an awful, awful thing!
I hope that maybe this woman has a screw loose and what she said was total fabrication but how incredibly cruel of anyone to say such a thing and if they DO have Mister, how incredibly cruel of them to not give him back to his rightful owners.
I remember the first time one of our ferrets went walkabout. It was our first male, Chucky, and we had only had him for a couple of days. He was a full male at the time and stank to high heaven, so I had him in our study. I had opened the sliding doors and had put a whiteboard on its side in the doorway, so that Chucky couldn’t get out but the breeze could get in.
Well – silly me. As I said, Chucky was our first boy and I had no idea about how high a determined ferret in rut could climb! I left him in the study for about 10 minutes and when I went back in, I couldn’t find him anywhere.
I called WAFFS’ Ferret Rescue and reported him missing and then got the kids and we rushed outside to try and see if we could find him. About half-an-hour later I get a call from Dianne, who ran the Ferret Rescue at the time, and she told me that Chucky had got into the laundry of someone’s house a couple of streets away and the woman had called her, saying this ferret had wandered into her house and what did she have to do to look after it.
Dianne told her to keep him there until we arrived to take him home! How lucky was that?!!
All of our original 6 ferrets went walkabout and that was because the kids were living with us at the time. They weren’t particularly observant when they came in or out of the house and so quite often a ferret would just wander out with them. Fortunately we got all of them back and since the kids have flown the coop, we haven’t had any more of ours getting out of the house.
Having good friends in WAFFS, I have heard so many horror stories about what happens to ferrets when they get out into the big, wide world. One particularly horrible one still upsets me when I think of it – a ferret kept on getting out and going next door and the guy next door got really fed up with seeing this ferret on his property because he kept chickens and he was convinced the ferret would kill his chooks.
He found the ferret in his backyard again so picked it up and put it in the owner’s wheelie bin outside, and didn’t tell his neighbour that the ferret was there. The owner goes looking for his ferret but, of course, never thinks to look inside his wheelie bin and so the ferret is in there for several days and ends up starving to death.
Is it just my perception or have people become meaner and much nastier than they were, say, 50 years ago? I sometimes wonder where the world is headed and what sort of place we’re leaving for our grandchildren.
