City Ballad of a Lost Ferret
Last Friday, I Slogged about the above “Lost Ferret” poster I’d been seeing on poles around my neighborhood.
Over the weekend, a number of pro-ferret readers expressed disgust and outrage at my cruelty and failure to have been aborted before my birth. (Scroll down to the comments here!)
To my ferret-friendly critics: I wasn’t advocating the beating death of a ferret. I was writing, however mean-spiritedly, about the importance of context in pet ownership. If you have a kitten that gets loose, most people will likely help care for it and return it naturally. But what if we’re talking about a pet rat? Most people will call an exterminator, and can you blame them? To me, a ferret is somewhere between a kitten and a rat, and thus it’s a toss-up how likely it is that a stranger will have the natural empathy to help a stray ferret find its way home.
Also, to whoever called my original post “useless”: Fifty bucks says the Slog post got word of the lost ferret out to more people than all the fliers combined. Good luck to Pam and to Cookie.
Walter Sobchak: Lets not forget Dude that keeping wildlife, um... an amphibious rodent, for... um, ya know domestic... within the city... that ain't legal either.
The Dude: What are you a fucking park ranger now?