We were discussing the dangers of ferrets lying behind cushions and getting crushed when people sat down on the chairs in the comments section of an earlier post and I said I’d show the damage Seamus has done to our sofa so here it is …

The first picture shows the empty spot in the top part of one of the cushions – this was the spot that Kaos found when the sofa was first delivered a few years ago.

I had picked it out in the showroom, thinking it was ferret proof. There was no gap between sofa and floor, and there seemed to be no way into the sofa when I moved the bottom cushions and checked the base.

HA! How wrong was I!

Within 24 hours of the suite’s arrival, Kaos managed to get right inside the sofa and I could hear her scrabbling around but had no idea what to do to get her out. I managed to tip the sofa over onto its side and saw there was no way I could get in from the bottom. Fortunately Kaos found her own way out, then she told Snoopy about it and before I knew it, both of them would go in and sleep at the top of that cushion.

They used to make a terrible fuss trying to get in and out (it turned out that there was a gap right at the top underneath all those cushions where the ferrets could climb in) so, to make life easier for us all, Philip cut a little flap into the back of the sofa.  

The things we do for our ferrets!!  * sigh *

Then we had to cut the bottom fabric off because the ferrets like to use that as a hammock but … Snoopy, being Snoopy, also used the far corner as a litter tray and I couldn’t have that.

When Seamus came along, he decided he wanted to lie just behind the right hand cushion at the bottom, but he also likes to pull all the stuffing down so that he has a nice soft bed to lie on.  When it’s time to take him to our bedroom, we find him sprawled on his back, snoring away in all the stringy bits of wadding he’s yanked down from the top so once we’ve taken him away, we shove all the wadding back up to the top of the cushion.

It’s like a game to him, I think!  He goes to the same spot every day and pulls as much wadding down as he can so he can stretch out in it.  Weird boy, that one!
This is the mess he created ….

And occasionally, when we come into the sitting room during the day, we’ll find bits of wadding on the sofa, which means Seamus has been scratching away and flicking bits of the stuffing out. You know how ferrets love to scratch at their bedding sometimes? Well Seamus does it in style!

So there you go. The sofa is no more than 3 years old and it’s totally wrecked.

It’s funny because when Nick, our son, came to visit the first time we had the new lounge suite, he flopped lengthwise onto the sofa, with his head resting on the arm, to watch TV and I just cracked up laughing when I saw him bolt upright with fright when he felt something moving under his head.

One of the ferrets, I forget which one, had got into the arm and was moving along from one end to another. It reminded me of a mole … this lump moving very slowly under the material! It scared him to death, as he couldn’t imagine what was moving under him.

But anyway, as you can see, it’d be pretty hard for a ferret to get squished under those cushions but I can see the danger if one had hard chairs, with cushions on the seats, and would agree that all ferret owners should be very vigilant about where their little ones were sleeping before sitting down!

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