Escaping Fish and Game
by Violet Weed
Aloha
My family of seven ferrets and I live in Tampa, Florida.... now. But for two years we (well, the ferrets) were illegal residents of the San Francisco Bay Area. At the end of April, I quit my job with a failing startup in Silicon Valley, packed up my fuzzbutts and drove my truck/trailer back to Florida. Several days into the trip, just as I’d crossed into Florida from Louisiana, and was gassing up my truck, I got a call on my cell phone (which still had a ‘408’ area code). It was from the Fish and Game Dept in California!!! Seems someone turned me as a ‘ferret owner’!!! (I am pretty sure it was a rather immature, insecure admin asst from work, where I was the Director.) Everyone at work knew I had ferrets, but none of my neighbors did, and I got all my deposit back from my house rental, so I know my landlord didn’t know it. (I buy 4’x6’ rug remnants, which I put on top of the carpeting. On top of this I put plastic carpet runner ... along all the walls and under the doors. This keep the ferrets from clawing the ‘real’ carpet, and since I put ferret litter boxes in every corner of the room plus strategically along the walls, if the ferrets ‘miss’ the box, they end up going on the plastic, which is a breeze to clean. Voila!
No problems with ferret poopies or clawing. But I digress...)
ANYWAY, the game warden told me I had a ‘day of amnesty’ during which time I could voluntarily turn over the ferrets or else they’d come to get them, I’d get a steep fine and the possibility of gaol time (jail time). Well, I was so elated at the call, I couldn’t help myself. I started doing a Steve Martin ‘war dance’ around my truck, laughing and cackling like the old witch the admin at work thinks I am. I wanted to say something really clever but all I could do was laugh hysterically and say something like “neeener, neeeener, NEEEner!!! I’m not IN California you you... you FERRET HATER you!!!! I, AND my woozles, are in FLORIDA!!!! What do you think of that?!!!!? So you know what you can do with your ‘amnesty’??? You can stick it where the sun don’ shine!!! HA AHA HAHAHAHAHAHA and then I hung up.
Okay, I could have been more mature, but I couldn’t help myself. By the way, about four years ago I worked a contract in the Venice Beach area... at that time I only had two ferrets (generally I have somewhere between 10 and 20, but old age had downsized my family to the two babies, who are now the two ‘old guys’).
I would take them for walks on the beach, they were never on leashes because my ferrets are ALWAYS voice-trained to return to me if I yell ‘HERE NOW HERE NOW’.
(You can train a ferret very easily to respond to voice commands with a clicker and a treat box... unless the ferret is deaf, but you can get deaf ones to respond to hand signals... I have a deaf boy right now, and I never take him anywhere except on a leash, but he’s the only one who needs the lease. Also I don’t take them for walks except one or two at a time, so that I can protect them from dogs, etc.)
I would tell the cops who foot-patrol Venice Beach that Arnold and Seal were ‘Florida Polecats’, when they would ask me if they were ferrets. They always bought that lie... or else chose to pretend along with me. It’s not the cops so much as the guys who stop you at the checkpoints, so you should always use ferretsanonymous.org maps to go around the checkpoints. Of course, if you lose a ferret in California, you shouldn’t advertise for ‘lost ferret’ but ‘lost polecat’ with a description of a ferret. And if possible you give a friend’s phone number, not your own, and then the ferret can be returned to the friend, where you can be waiting to escort it home. That way, when the friend gets a call from the Fish and Game folks, he/she can honestly claim that it must have been a typo in the paper as they don’t have any ferrets.
Well, that’s my ferret story, you can look at my
pictures on my website...
Have a great day!