Wanted: Dead or Alive

A friend gave my son a ferret for his tenth birthday in August. They say ferrets bite. They are right. This one, named disrespectfully after my husband, did little else apart from eating and pooping. It bit my son more than anyone. It also bit his friends, my friends, babysitters, someone who works for my husband and the blacksmith’s apprentice who is a ferret expert and managed to handle it for longer than anyone else before being bitten. About 20 seconds. The blacksmith’s apprentice is tough and accustomed to wrestling huge horses but he was no match for the ferret.

We don’t seem to have much luck with animals smaller than Labradors. My two ponies are very happy, our Labrador is one of the oldest and contentedly smelliest in the county. But our hamsters have all escaped, the guinea pig was dropped resulting in a fatal concussion and one rabbit froze to death while another ran away. (There was a period when rabbits were pets before they became prey.) I should have known the ferret would be a disaster. I probably did, but my better judgement was swayed by the idea that perhaps having a ferret would mean that my son could go and kill rabbits in the garden without a firearm or a resentful adult being involved.

We tried everything suggested by books, the internet, the person who gave it to my son and the blacksmith’s apprentice. Everything short of buying it a friend. Nothing worked. It hated us, we hated it and the rule that if my son had a ferret he had to look after it was eventually being flouted every day. I became quite ingenious at feeding it without touching it and filling its water with a hose over the door of the stable that had become its home. Cleaning it out was more of a challenge.

Anyway, whadya know? One day a couple of weeks ago it escaped. We went happily back to a ferret free existence. Free from anxiety about being savaged by it, free from guilt about whether it needed a friend, free from having to make special expeditions to a particularly dreary industrial estate in the third-rate local town to buy ferret nuggets and free from the smell of ferret. But you know what they (the same lot who say that ferrets bite) say about bad smells? (And ferret is a very bad smell.) Instead of taking itself off to the moor to live off voles and ticks or allowing itself to be lifted away by the scruff of its ungrateful neck by a hungry buzzard, it decided to hang around our house. In fact it moved in. Every morning last week, when the builders arrived it would be there before them, curled up in some of our lovely new insulation or beadily eyeing one of the bunches of expensive new cables which seem to be everywhere and smacking its curled lips.

There is now a price on the ferret's head. It is slightly less than the cost of replacing one bunch of newly installed data cables, but is still a significant sum.