Somewhere There's A Life In Here

While waiting for this week's episode of Dateline: Watch Us Catch Even More 40-Year Old Losers Who Think 13 Year Old Girls Are Hot For Them, I caught a one hour special on PBS.

It's the documentary they've been promoting every day, all day for the last couple of weeks called Ferrets: The Pursuit of Excellence.

Ferrets are what happens when your feline and a rat have sex. You still get a rat, but it can use the kitty litter.

Oddly, unlike dogs that have a tendency to look like their owners and vice versa, the opposite is apparently true with ferrets.

Something about a ferret's long skinny body seems to attract owners that look like stuffed furniture. In fact, the documentary could have been about the lives of rotund, middle aged women with short cropped hair who think you can't see their butts if they don't tuck in their shirts.

Is it just me or does watching these women hold their ferrets and stroke them lovingly from the tops of their heads down the length of their bodies again and again and again seem pornographic? Here's the answer: yes.  If dogs are man's best friend, ferrets are for lonely women.

About halfway through we learn that each of these enthusiasts likes to attend competitions where ferrets vie for the honor of taking home a colored ribbon. They all have walls full of ribbons in myriad colors. If blue is first place, red is for second, followed by green, white, and yellow, not necessarily in that order, I wonder what orange, maroon, and ecru signify?

There is a revealing title card at the end which points out that at the largest ferret show in the country, The Buckeye Bash, 327 or so ferrets competed. Somehow the judges managed to award 400 ribbons.

The ferrets get points in a variety of silly categories, from colors to personality to communication skills, none of which reflects the real purpose of these furry animals as living, breathing marital aids.

But no one ever mentions anything like that. Instead of telling the truth, they talk about their ferrets as their children. How entertaining they are. How nice it is that they don't need batteries. How much they miss them when they die.

Speaking of dead ferrets, there's a club of ferret owners who collect their dead ferrets in a freezer until they get to 26 pounds' worth. They showed the freezer, sitting silently in the corner of a storage area. Once they make weight, they're eligible for the dead ferret discount. That's when they can take all those cold, furry bodies to be cremated in one batch. Afterward they pass out ashes to each member -- two tablespoons equals one ferret.

The thought of collecting dead ferrets convinces me that somewhere, someone is wearing a ferret fur undergarment.

Perhaps a better name for this documentary would have been SICKO.