My daughter has two ferrets, Roxy and Noodle. They are the most fun loving adorable ferrets I have seen, and we have them before. They are liter box trained and listen really good to commands. They have one problem, they chew anything rubber or rubber coated. Doesn't matter what it is, if it has rubber, it will be chewed. Any solutions besides caging them all the time. Except for the rubber chewing they leave other things alone, and are really well behaved.
I have heard of some ferrets like to chew on rubber or plastic things. Although I haven't heard of exactly answer of how to stop them, logic tells me you can do one of the following,
1. Hide the particular items from ferrets. If you are unable to hide the stuff, then make that room inaccessible to the ferrets.
2. Coat the particular items they love to chew on with something smell or taste bad for them.
3. Provide some ferret toys to keep your ferrets preoccupied. Or get something resist chewing.
Their chewing is restricted to only rubbery items, not hard heavy plastics. I never thought about coating the item with something that tastes or smells bad. Great tip! I'll do some research and see what I can use, that will also be safe.
As far as toys, they have more toys than a five year old as well as chewing posts.
I know they sell something called "bitter apple" for dogs and cats that chew. You would have to go into a pet store and see if this would be safe to use on ferrets as well. I would think that it is safe, but not positive, as they are really small animals. I used this on my dog and it worked great when we were trying to train her. Good luck! It seems like those ferrets are great pets otherwise.
Aha, yeah we have one ferret who has a fetish for chewing rubber. I see her as a little bondage queen. Bitter apples works well, as does hiding anything that is rubbery away. Luckily they usually aren't interested in wires, so there is no harm, and buying a nice squeeky rubber toy should suffice their appetites.
When I was between 8-12 years old, I had an obsession with chewing on electrical wires (I wasn't the brightest child). My counselor decided to start coating all the wires I had access to with some kind of bitter, foul tasting spray. I dropped the habit very quickly. I don't see why the same method wouldn't work for ferrets. Or you could get them some rubber chew toys or something.
