Guide to Training Your Pet Ferret

by Gerry Bucsis and Barbara Somerville

[nannah]

Ahh, ferret books. I will most likely read them all at some point, because my hyperfixiation is that strong. But a book about training your ferrets? I think this is the only one out there, and I knew I had to read it first!

There’s a lot of good stuff in here, and I’ll definitely be using some of the actual training information. However, with half the page time spent on teaching the reader about ferrets as pets (what litter they need, what food they eat, what cages they should have, etc.), I feel there’s too little information about actually training the ferrets in the ~50 pages left. There are many other books and references, some published by the same authors, that cover the basics of owning a pet ferret.

I also wish this manual was more comprehensive, too, not an overview of methods you could use (“look clicker training up, they could be applied to ferrets”) with just a few tricks and house training tips explained in detail. Things like harness training is a paragraph-long aside, which is strange since they spend a lot of time talking about walking ferrets and the use of collars (which, by the way, should not be kept on your ferret all the time! I know it seems like it makes sense, given how we care for cats and dogs, but the risk of strangulation is way too high as ferrets sneak and wiggle into all sorts of spaces - and there’s also a risk of damage to the ferrets’ necks if you don’t keep sizing them up correctly, because collars have to be tight to stay on [a ferret’s head and neck are nearly the same size].).

Speaking of information that may be outdated (the second edition I read was published in 2010), they insist on using (Marshalls) skin and coat supplement, which is not the best treat for a ferret. One, because Marshalls is a gigantic ferret mill, and two, because these supplements are filled with sugars that cause insulinoma in ferrets, the biggest killer of ferrets in the US. Instead, use salmon oil.

There are things like this scattered throughout the little book, which is annoying in the only ferret training manual, but there are also a ton of great tips too. The use of a dowel with a plastic spoon filled with a treat taped to one end to lure a ferret to come to the sound of their name is a fantastic idea. I plan to try this one as soon as I can get a dowel! And I especially appreciated the chapter on how to adapt training for deaf and blind ferrets.

It’s tough, because there’s both a lot of great things here, but also some dangerous information. I’m torn on this one.