Bun has learned all about treats, and he’s very adept at picking up signals from me about when they are forthcoming. The first step to photographing your ferret is to condition him to treat-giving culture. If you can teach your ferret to respond to stimuli, then you can use that stimuli to make him do things he doesn’t want to do…like hold still for more than one second. That’s step one of photographing ferrets.
Of course the main reason you should train your ferret with treats is so he knows to come when you whistle. That’s so maybe you can retrieve him when he runs away. That’s the theory anyway. When Pig Warrior Ferret ran away a few years ago at Halloween, she came back but it wasn’t because I was whistling. In fact, I’d spent hours whistling for her after I realized she was gone, but she either didn’t hear it or was too confused to respond. She came back to get her favorite toy, a snorkel, which I’d put by the side door next to some of her bedding. But maybe the whistle worked, because when I saw her I held out a raising and whistled and lured her into the house that way.
So anyway, whistle training is good for your ferret in case he gets outside and you have to search for him. But a whistle can also make a ferret stop and think for a moment, during which time you hopefully press the shutter button and get a ferret portrait.
Bun in this picture was busy checking Ben’s teeth for abnormalities like does every other day. Since he is a very cuddly ferret, he kind of lay still for a moment to think about life, while being held. So I figured,
nice time for a picture.
By the time I got my camera ready, three seconds later, he was fidgeting again. So I took a cheerio (loves ‘em) and whistled and he froze, thinking about it. Snap, and voila.
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