Forget It

Remember the Seinfeld bit about Aliens observing Earth through a telescope and trying to figure out which species is dominant?  Well they conclude that dogs rule the world. Why?  Because when the dogs take walks they have human slaves following them, and apparently the humans’ job is to  stoop over, bag up the dog waste and carry it around in little plastic bags.  Meanwhile,  the dogs merrily go on their way, trotting along and not worrying about such mundane things.  Just Google “Seinfeld dog poop” if you don’t know that episode.

I love dogs, but this scenario is what keeps me from owning one.  I took care of my boss’s dog once and the experience was humiliating and disgusting.  I will never do that again.  If I ever own a dog, I will live in the country and I will not touch a hot steaming bag of poop, not once, not ever.

On the flip side, we have marvelous ferrets, which require none of this. They are low-maintenance and pretty much take care of themselves.  They are clean, and have ingrained ideas about what to do with their waste, which you can manipulate so that they use a litter box.

Ingrained ideas about litter boxes?  Well not quite.  You see, in the wild, ferret life is based on tunnels.  They steal tunnels from other animals and set up shop in them, assigning each tunnel a function, like so many rooms in a house.  After taking over a prairie dog village of tunnels, the first thing they do is plan out how they’ll use those tunnels.  

Here’s the tunnel for sleeping…here’s tunnel number two for sleeping, here’s the tunnel for our waste, etc.  Priority is to all agree on a tunnel which will become their bathroom. This takes precedence in case someone has to go right away after fighting the prairie dogs.

To use a “bathroom” tunnel, a ferret backs into it, leaves a deposit, then simply skitters forward and out of the dirty tunnel, all clean and ready to steal things or plan the next prairie dog raid or whatever it is he is up to next.

The next ferret who feels the call of nature backs into the tunnel but only as far as the front edge of the previous ferret’s you know what.  He lays it down, then exits the tunnel.  Again, very clean and efficient.

Eventually the tunnel fills up and what do they do then?  Find another tunnel of course!  Move on and leave that s@*t tunnel, never looking back.  Other than suburban dog owners, who would want to mess with poop?

We as humans have learned to manipulate this ingrained behavior in order to have clean house pets that use the litter box.  You see, ferrets don’t use the litter box because they evolved with humans and were taught how to be good pets.  They use litter boxes because it just happens to kind of match what they do in the wild.  We know what they do…back up into a tunnel.  We use our superior intelligence to trick our ferrets by making sure a litter box is always magically in place when and where a ferret decides to go.

So in reality, the ferret isn’t trained…we are.  It’s kind of like the dog situation in that the animal just goes when he feels like it and we’re there to catch the mess.  The main difference is ferret owners  don’t have to publicly handle steaming bags of smelly dog s@*t.

All we have to do is plan and scoop.  Plan and scoop.  All in all, I’d say that’s much better than follow, stoop, grab and carry.