How to Introduce a New Ferret Member into Your House

At first, when you get a ferret, you think that you two will spend every waking minute together. You can’t imagine being apart! But then life will resume back to normal and you will find yourself spending less and less time with your pet.

Unfortunately, ferrets are active and energetic no matter whether you spend time with them or not. If you find yourself spending less and less time with your energetic ferret, you might want to consider getting another ferret to be a companion. Then again, your new ferret might not like its new partner. What should you do?

If you are about to introduce a new ferret to your home, you should definitely be sure that the animal does not carry any diseases. They can easily infect the other ferrets. They should at least have their minimum shots before you introduce them to the home. You will also want the animals to be pretty close in age so that they bond quickly. You should preferably introduce the new ferret roughly a month after the first ferret so that you don’t deal with territorial issues.

There are a lot of techniques that you can use to get your ferrets better acquainted.

Ferrets react by their sense of smell. They react to smell to tell how they will identify who is a part of their “pack” and who is not. Newcomers, however, will have an unfamiliar scent and this can make the ferrets cautious. However, you can turn this trait into an advantage.

If you place their cages next to one another, they may initially react by hissing and clawly, but they won’t be able to get to one another. After a day or so, you can switch their bedding, mixing their two scents together. This way, they will start to regard each other’s scent as part of their normal environment and accept each other more readily.

Next, you can introduce the animals face-to-face. You should let them get a good look and sniff at each other. It might help to put them both on a leash in case there is future trouble. At first, you will see some rough housing as they determine which one is the dominant animal between them.

Wear leather gloves and take them off the leash, but make sure it is an enclosed area that they cannot hide in holes. You will have to watch them carefully since you don’t want the ferrets to bite enough, creating infections. If you have gloves on, you can pick them up if they are fighting with less chance of getting bitten yourself.

Bathing them together would be difficult, but again, this would mix their scents and make them friendlier. It would help to have one person hold one ferret and one person hold the other. If they continue to argue, you can spray bite deterrent spray on the next of the submissive one, which should discourage the aggressive one from biting.

If you have a lot of patience, you can introduce another ferret into your family and give two pets a wonderful, happy and healthy life with their own social group. Everyone will be a little happier.

         

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