Hippie
Hippie is a huge success story as far as ferret adoption goes. He was left at a shelter and we adopted him after he’d been there for many months, languishing in a small cage with another abandoned ferret. Of course we never intended to have three ferrets… all the litter scooping we imagined prevented us from even considering the idea of three in the house.
At the urging of a fellow ferret owner, who in retrospect may have had a plan to set things in motion towards an adoption, we paid a visit to the two ferrets at the SPCA. She insisted that we would be doing a world of good just by offering the poor ferrets some human contact while they waited out their sentence in the shelter before someone adopted them. Then during the months that went by after our first visit, our hearts were won over and we adopted one of the shelter ferrets and the scheming lady mentioned above took the other. I guess her plan worked!
The shelter had been calling them Chunky and Monkey. We took Chunky and quickly renamed him Hippie because he was too fat and sad to play fight with the others. He would just lay down and submit when they picked on him. It was like he was saying “Peace, man, I just want to chill” so he became Hippie.
Hippie is hilarious when he schlumps around, carrying his massive weight from one end of the apartment to the other, tiny feet slipping out side to side as he “runs”, a laughable sight. He sits down every chance he gets, unable to bear his own weight for very long. When chased by Bun and Pig, he often collapses due to exhaustion, falling into a massive pile of white furry fat.
Well laugh all you want, because lately Hippie has become fierce, like Pig and Bun. He may look awkward, ungainly, even ridiculous with all that clumsy weight he lugs around, but he’s completely transformed into a fighter ferret. He now instigates brawls, wins them, and then comes back for more.
We now consider the name Hippie to be sort of a joke.
