Ferret bonds are hard to break
Some animals do just fine without the company of members of their own species. Our two cats, for example, seem to gain super-cat energy and confidence when the other has taken an unauthorized vacation to get outside. When there’s no competition for our love, our fluffy homebody seems to radiate an all-Zen vibe.
Other pets are a little less Machiavellian. Ferrets are known at a young age to bond with someone special whom they will seek out for companionship throughout their days. This is well illustrated by a daily romp on the living room floor together, but somehow, in the wake of a narrowly averted tragedy, the bond is especially well lit.
For a direct comparison with our cats, we can consider what happened when our young male Yossarian bolted out the front door one night as I was walking in with a bag of groceries. He was gone for about 45 minutes without anyone noticing and an additional 2 hours as we frantically searched our perimeter. Yossarian’s partner, Pancake, was unusually sullen after about 2 hours of his absence. As a scientist, she would normally try to avoid personifying her emotions by calling her “worried or depressed” as it is equally possible that her disposition was caused by gas or boredom, however this was the first time she had allowed herself to be held for long without being anxious to escape. Normally she hates being picked up and petted, but here we were all standing by an empty cage almost crying together, she flopped onto my wife’s arm, exhaling deeply at intervals, her eyes half closed, not responding to the gentle caresses. . “Okay, pancake,” he turned to her. “Is it worry or gas?”
Pancake and Yossarian look happy sleeping together, but you don’t really know if it’s out of something close to love, or if it’s just more practical to do so. To find out, you have to separate them. In their second great separation, when they had to operate on Yossarian, we hoped, convinced as we were that they loved each other forever, that she would fall back into something similar to a “depression.”
We didn’t really see it this time. She seemed fine: good appetite, active and inquisitive. “Pancakes!” we warned him: “Aren’t you worried in the least? He’ll be operated on at any moment! Come here and let us hug you so we can worry properly together!”
It’s hard to understand how ferrets decide that there is “something wrong with this picture.” They have a different priority checklist and process a different set of information than we do. Their vision is extremely poor, so they hear and smell when things change more than they see them. Pancake may have been more distracted by our noisy preparations (installing a new cage, cleaning and rearranging furniture) for Yossarian’s homecoming to notice his absence. Or perhaps having been together longer and experiencing more frequent endings to separate naps, he has become less sensitive to periods of prolonged solitude.
Whatever she was thinking, it’s clear she still has feelings for him. One day after surgery, we let him join him in his cage and, as if to say “welcome back, I’ve missed you”, she foisted an emergency brushing on him and he, being very weak, didn’t he had no choice but to willingly submit.
