Someone in the crack van, I think it was M31, asked if ferrets smell. Yeah, they do. If you don’t clean their cage and you don’t clean their litterbox and you don’t swap out the bedding and blankets they sleep in, they smell. Like any animal, really. So once a day the litterboxes get cleaned, once a week the laundry gets swapped out, and about once every couple of months or whenever I feel like giving them a rockin’ good time, the boys get a bath.
You’re not supposed to bathe them too much or put heavy, perfume-y sprays on them; it actually makes things worse because the crafty little buggers will overcompensate by becoming even filthier, and it dries out their fur and makes them upset. I will never forget the woman who brought her son’s REEKING ferret into the shelter to surrender him and told us, quite seriously, “I bathe him everyday, but he still stinks.”
Bucky, Puck and Riot are mostly just put in the tub to splash around a little while and then, when they start trying to clamber out, I give them as much of a towel-dry as I can handle and let them dry themselves off on the floor:
Some people blow-dry them. Why deny them all that fun?
A.