I'd like to take a bit of a break from my normal range of topics. Let's talk about ferrets for a bit. Meet Malik Daoud. His name is Arabic for King David, and he has that name because he was so small when I got him, and because I detest prejudice in all its forms and, at the time, an Arabic name seemed appropriate to make a statement about that. Ironically, Malik Daoud was also the nickname that the Iraqis applied to US Army General David Petraeus...so there was that element of irony as well.
The above photo was taken in December of 2015. I'd walked into the local pet store on a Wednesday morning, as I usually do (and have done for years) and they had two two new kits (baby ferrets) a Marked White Sprite (Spayed female) kit and this tiny little Cinnamon Gib (Neutered male) kit. Just a few minutes before this picture was taken, he was crawling around on the bottom of the ferret cage, pitifully crying for his Mommy, who I'm sure he was still missing after only a couple days of being in transit. I looked at his teeth...shockingly (although it is unfortunately fairly common to see this nowadays) the look of his short little baby-teeth suggested he was at most six weeks old. I decided to take a picture of him. The little dude fit in the palm of my hand, and used the opportunity of being left there to curl up and go to sleep. I carried him around that way for 20 minutes, before transferring him to the inside of my T-shirt. I wasn't looking to get another ferret that day, but I had the cash, and I couldn't leave him there. He didn't even need to go in the pet carrier. He slept curled up in my shirt all the way home. I would later have to give him his own food dish, with moistened kibble, which he attacked as if he had never seen food before.
There's a reason for that.
Malik is, as most pet store ferrets in the United States are, a Marshall ferret. Marshall farms is widely hated among knowledgeable ferret owners for a variety of reasons that could easily be a blog post of their own. But let's start with this: They produce (or have produced on their behalf) all sorts of ferret-related items, most of which are junk (although their hammocks and stuff are pretty decent) not least of all the food.
Marshall ferret food ranks solidly in the orange section on the More Dooks ferret food chart (you can Google this yourself or here's a link) meaning a ferret can live on it, but probably won't thrive. They sell basically everything to do with ferrets, and a good deal that has nothing more to do with ferrets than a picture of one on the container, and the food they put their name on is crap. Keep that in mind.
Also, keep in mind that none of this is the pet store's fault. The people who work there have mostly been good people, the animals they have are well cared for, the ferrets have a Ferret Nation cage, usually a good hammock or other thing to sleep on, the litter gets changed daily and the employees make sure they get out of the cage and are handled. That's the lap of luxury for a pet store ferret
I have 33 ferrets. Of those ferrets, 16 are owner-surrenders, rescues, re-homed or were sold to me by owners who no longer had time or the capability to care for them, but had the sense to know it. Of those ferrets, all but one are Marshall ferrets...as denoted by two green dots tattooed in their right ear. The other one was an owner-surrender via the same pet store who literally jumped into my arms and started dooking when I opened the cage.
Four of those Marshall ferrets have been less than eight weeks old and clearly not thriving at the time of sale. Ideally, baby ferrets should be with their mothers until at least eight weeks of age, though twelve weeks is better. Sometimes, as with several the pet store has had lately, the wee ones catch on quick, become socialized and do well. Sometimes, they don't.
Some people see a baby ferret as an adorable, furry little soul. Others see a baby ferret as $150 with fur on it.
I also have had two other ferrets that have died, Aella (3-year-old Dark-Eyed White Sprite and official Queen of All Ferrets, after a long struggle with ulcers and other stomach issues, topped off by the flu, and many vet bills) and Wulfgar (a very large Champagne Gib who died unexpectedly at 10 months of an undiagnosed heart condition according to his Necropsy. He was big, he was lazy, he only ever went to the vet for a checkup and we all missed checking for that.)
I feed my ferrets either Evo cat food (87% meat) Evo dog food (83% meat, but it's cheaper and they have bigger bags) or Orijen cat food (95% meat, but expensive) and I've tried them on Orijen dog food (85% meat, expensive, but cheaper than the cat food.) So, in all cases they eat very well. The "cheap" food (Evo dog food) is close to $70 for a 25-pound bag. That will last me about two weeks, and I keep a spare around.
A five pound bag of Marshall ferret kibble and a six pound bag of Evo dog food are the same price. You aren't saving anything by buying the bad food. There's no quality/quantity trade-off here. Marshall Farms just wants to stiff you on food that'll eventually kill your ferret, so that then you will go buy another one. This kind of "Company Store" bullshit in most other respects has been illegal since the Great Depression and the New Deal that resulted from it.
To me, and to most of my readers as well, especially those of us who live with this stuff...this is and should be nonsensical. It's a perversion of the purpose of life, really.
Also, a word about ferret foods in general...with the exception of Evo Ferret (discontinued) or Evanger's (wet food) most ferret foods are garbage. Ferrets are obligate carnivores and require meat or a meat based food...on the ingredients list, five of the first six ingredients should be meat, at minimum. Let me show you something:
If you look at cat foods or dog foods, let alone ferret foods available at Wal-Mart (that's where this picture and the one of the Marshall kibble bag above were taken) most of them are horrible for your animals. This is a problem endemic to the pet food industry, which the FDA and USDA seem to consider an inconvenience to actually regulate.
...And that's when Republicans aren't in power. As we've seen lately, when Republicans are in power, they gut regulations, rape the earth, sell off federal lands, and promote the coal and oil industries...because that's who gives them money.
All people at my level get out of this, ever, is that Republicans promote racism and either passively or actively (under Trump) tolerate (or encourage) people being shitty racists.
Now, I have no idea who the owners of Marshall farms are or what their politics are...but as a ferret owner whose main contribution to this long-running struggle has been to save a few babies who never should have been there for me to buy in the first place, the only way to fix this problem is to elect Democrats or the rare Conservation-minded Republican and stay on them until they pass Federal laws that require decent conditions for commercially-raised animals, pet foods that the pets can actually eat, etc. nationwide.
...And some people don't understand why Republicans and their rich benefactors hate government so much on a conceptual level. The State, customarily backed by force of law, rule of law, and ultimately armed force...is the only power that can coerce decent behavior or obedience to laws and morals from rich people. The purpose of government is to protect the weak from the ruthless. Otherwise, what damned good is it?
Now, if you think Republicans or rich people have any better intentions for a human like me, who hangs on to the bottom rung of the Middle Class primarily due to the fact that I have a decent car and don't have any kids, than they do for ferrets...you have another thing coming. They want me to be poor, so that I have to devote even more of my income to basic survival, have less time to be aware and engaged with what's happening, and ultimately to price the few things (like ferrets) that make my life better out of my reach...because the only thing that makes a miserable bastard happy is making other people miserable. We've already had the experience of taking a dog-breeder approach to humanity. It was called Slavery and we fought a war to end it.
Hell, as my friend Aaron put it the other day, a big part of why Republicans and the wealthy have been able to hack away at the New Deal is because once racists couldn't deny the benefits of it to Black people, they basically decided they didn't want it anymore.
Now, if they really wanted to, for only a small increase in price, Marshall farms could keep kits with their Moms until they were 12 weeks old, they could make better food and not sell so much junk stuff that nobody needs, and they'd probably have a better reputation and, long-term, a more profitable business.
Just like the Republican Party, if it wanted to, or cared about its survival long term...could promote a more diverse, inclusive, tolerant form of conservatism, based around economics but also promoting religion in order to foster values and find a way to work for the greater good of everybody. Instead, no, they go for base greed, the path or least resistance, the short-term solution, the social heroin of fascism and racism, and whatever else will degrade this country, it's social fabric, and what have you especially if it will make money for their rich donors and keep their hateful, resentful followers pointed at whoever they don't like right now.
Take for example, the subject of immigration...which is, at this point, a necessity for this country if we want to continue to be able to pay Baby Boomers social security checks, much less continue to grow and innovate and be the powerful nation that we are. I've seen massive amounts of anti-immigration stuff posted by right-wingers on Twitter lately, and I think it's ridiculous. My Great Grandma Thompson was born in Norway in 1900. We're the world's melting pot, and diversity is...and always has been...our strength. People come from all over the world, and sign on to the idea of being an American. I don't think Trump and his supporters have a basic idea of immigration. I'm not sure they had the slightest idea what citizenship is. No, There is no American Volk, we don't share a common culture or language or religion or a thousand years of history. All we have is what we want to be.
Unfortunately some Americans want to be Nazis.
Some Americans think they'll profit from pain, and that justice will not come in this life or the next.
...And by profit, I mean they think they'll get money. Sometimes they do. Sometimes they cause far worse problems that cost far more than anyone earns or ever will. The wars in Afghanistan and Iraq are prime examples of this.
On a (usually) smaller scale, so are corporate abuses.
A ferret cannot help but be a ferret. They are literally incapable of being anything else.
But, it seems like if you wave a big enough wad of money under a human's nose, you can damned well get a human to not act like a human being.
Hell, you don't even have to go that far, sometimes, you can just tell them it's OK to hate somebody for no reason and some people will follow you straight to hell.
That's a hell of a way to run a railroad, it doesn't work long-term, and it's gone on far longer than it should have already. At this point, we can either hang together...or hang separately. If the rest of us hang together, we just might win.
Some days, you wonder how anybody can survive this insanity we've found ourselves in. I sometimes wonder if this country might come flying apart, and split into two or three smaller countries. But then, when you really look at it, there's more of us then there are of the assholes, and Trump doesn't have enough public support for his whole dictator schtick to take hold.
This little guy doesn't seem too worried. Of course he doesn't have any social media accounts or watch TV or deal with idiots all day.
This is Malik Daoud, today, fat, happy and healthy and part of a large, crazy family. I wonder sometimes if he even remembers where he came here from or how he got here. If he does, he doesn't seem too bothered by it.
But that's not the point, the point is we need to make it so that everybody has a shot at a decent life here...and it doesn't matter where they came from or how they got here. Everybody deserves to have a decent life...whether they walk on two legs or four. A human should not have to be born as the right color or the right station in life to live decently, a ferret should not have to hope that they luck into getting purchased by the right human. All that needs to happen to make things better for everybody is that those who already have too much learn to do with just a little bit less. You'd think people who have more money than they could ever spend wouldn't notice the difference.
"Make America Great Again" isn't a philosophy, it's a way to sell hats to morons. You want a philosophical data point to start with? I say, we need better justice.
Until we have better justice, economically, socially, and in terms of rule of law and even how we treat those who break it...the greatness of this country will not be fully realized.
We all come from the same Creator. Animals seem to understand this. We humans had better get with the program. If we don't, what are we even doing here?
Man does not weave this web of life. He is merely a strand of it. Whatever he does to the web, he does to himself. ~Chief Seattle.
Next up: American Revelation, Part 1
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