Dear Ferret Depot,

What an exciting and busy year 2006 has started out being here at Ferret Wise! In the past few months 6 of our elder ferrets (Lucky, Pancho, Onyx, Dargo, Jerimiah, Sandro) have had needed surgeries, one tiny new face (Merlin) has joined our shelter group (and is doing marvelously well both health and behavior wise). We are thankful that we have not received the volume of reports of ferrets needing help during the post Holiday season.

Our education venue consists of monthly Ferret Meet-ups in Keene, NH. We have seen a few new faces in attendance and on April 8th we will be participating at the local Petco with an educational booth for those interested in the prospect of ferret ownership, Ferret Wise mailed out over 400 of our first quarter educational news letters and we have a second issue coming up soon! Ferret Wise educators were also contacted by the NH state director of agriculture markets and industries which oversees all state pet shop sales of animals. We were asked to provide information (backed up by veterinary texts) for them with regard to temperatures and climate conditions for store keeping. In response to those queries we are hopeful that we may see changes in state regulations with regard to ferret specifications in pet shops. Additionally, several magazine articles are being readied for publication and the best yet… we are making progress on laying out the veterinary publication we received the FerretDepot.com grant for. Shortly we will decide how many pamphlets in the series and get professional printing cost projections. This is another project that our new state veterinary director has expressed interest in.

We are aware the costs will far exceed the grant received to produce the brochure and do an initial mailing to veterinary practices, but we hope to devise more fund raising to help the project along! We have received a personal donation form a shelter volunteer of $300, which brings the pamphlet project development funds up to $1300.00

See the photos included of the process of pamphlet building. It is taking a little longer than we had expected to finalize the layout and editorial process but we are still a small organization and the animal care and fund raising to provide it has had to come first.

We hope you are as excited about this process as we are! Hopefully it will help more ferrets than we have been able to asist by email and phone contacts plus give the veterinarians a good tool in their practices. Hope you are all having as great a 2006.

Sincerely,

Alicia Drakiotes and the many faces of Ferret Wise


Here is a preview of the Ferret Wise Brochure in progress. Courtesy of Alicia Drakiotes