Bandit Having Fun with a Mouse

[dalamar]

Hope this works. This is a video of Bandit killing a mouse. I'm putting it in this section because I could just feed her a regular dead mouse, but she just loves to hunt!

Oh, the video is pretty short. She jumps into the box and seconds later its all over. Next time I'll have to give the knife a knife just to even things up a bit.

s309.photobucket.com/albums/kk377/Dalamar777/?action=view¤t=BanditKillingaMouse.flv

After she kills it I pick her up and put her in the cage. She then proceeds to eat the head and then goes back to the kill box to find another! She loves it so much, I wish I could give her 4 a day, but that will have to wait until the mice start reproducing.

When Mal kills his, he just runs off and eats the whole thing.

[whipple]

Thats cool. Although personally I have a hard time feeding live. Your fert must love it.

[josiesmom]

Yeehaw! Way to go Bandit! Dalamar, is your bathroom ferret/mouse proofed? You can up the enrichment and hunting factor by allowing the mouse to be caught in a slightly larger area.

You'll be amazed at how Bandit's skills improve and how tenacious ferrets can be. Also how silly it is when they lose track of the mouse. The newbies do well as long as the mouse stays within whisker range, but outside of that range and then they need to hone thier sense of smell, sight and hearing.

I'll move my guys from the kill bin to the shower stall, to the entire bathroom as their skills improve.

I have a short length of dryer tubing behind the toilet, a couple dressers and cabinets that the mouse can escape under( but the ferrets can also follow) and under or behind the hamper is a great mouse hide out. Both boys are strong enough to move the hamper in order to get to the mouse!

The only ferret that has not become a successful hunter of adult mice is Faylene, my soon to be 7 year old ferret. She just is not aggressive enough to kill a mouse anything larger than a fuzzy, barely a hopper. She'll eat a dead adult, but won't kill it because they fight back too much for her.

The others get positively P. O'd if the mouse offers any resistance!

"Resistance is futile!"

Its great to see another happy ferret!

Cheers,
Kim

[pear2apple]

I feed Apple live mice is the bathtub. Although the last one was a white mouse on white, so he never really saw it unless it was underneath his face. We kept having to pick it up and move it to him.

But usually it takes a few minutes for Apple to kill them. Now Kiwi, I play with felted mice with her and she's ferocous! That should be fun!

[dalamar]

Dalamar, is your bathroom ferret/mouse proofed? You can up the enrichment and hunting factor by allowing the mouse to be caught in a slightly larger area.

Well, we had a mishap last week with a mouse. It jumped out of the old kill box and was running around the house trying to escape. Bandit was not amused when it got away and she simply refused to stop looking for it. I helped too because I didn't want a mouse running around; so I would find the mouse and take Bandit over to it, then it ran under the couch and came out the other side at top speed with Bandit close behind. It would have been ok except that it hit the wall and had to turn. Bandit was on it in a second!

Ever since then she goes crazy for them. She knows where I keep the ones that I am breeding and keeps trying to get into the room. At night when they start making noise she sits at the door pacing back and forth.

And I have noticed that since we started doing this she is all muscle, more active than the others, and I think it made her smarter. This isn't so good because she was already too smart before!

I think next time I will try the bathtub though.