why are you licking me hey guys welcome back today I am with you from inside my bathtub because I'm gonna share with you today on information regarding whether or not you should give your ferrets a bath so when it comes to giving your fair in a fast it's actually recommended that you don't pay them very often every time you give a ferret bath it actually strips their coats of the natural oils that their skin produces so a healthy ferrets skin and coat actually produce natural oils just like hair on a human your hair or your scalpel actually produce oils itself people actually mistakenly give their ferrets fats more often because they try to get rid of that musky smell that ferrets path which me I actually enjoy the smell that they have yeah you stink but you stink in a good way I mean it kind of makes sense you would think baths make things cleaner so giving your ferret a fact more often should make them smell less when in fact it actually does the opposite be more often than you want to get down the more often that you actually bathe your ferrets the smellier they can actually be because what happens is what happens is when you give them a bath you are actually stripping their coat in the fur of these natural oils and when you strip their fur and coat it I have an escapee yeah hang with me for a little bit and when you strip their skin and coats of these natural oils their body actually works that much harder to / reproduce these oils get and when they try to reproduce these oils they're actually going to end up over producing these oils much more than if you were to just left their coat alone and not giving them a bath and these oils is what tends to give them their musky smell so doing that actually gives them more oils therefore making them more smelly and again smell is in the eye of the beholder because me just like lots of people don't mind the smell my guys don't really smell very much at all do you know you're not a stinky memories stinky all now this is not to say that you should never ever give your ferret a bath there are gonna be times that your ferret is going to need baths so if they end up getting into something stinky or something happens you might have to give them a bath for instance our video where we do painting with our ferrets where we get a little paint on their little paws and let them walk on canvas so we got our little picture of all the little paw prints we obviously had to give them a bath because we didn't want to leave paint on their paw prints but other than that we very rarely give them baths they probably get actual baths oh are you licking me are you licking me you're so lovely you're so lovely Oh mm-hmm but we honestly only probably give them baths at the most maybe four times a year but they probably only get actual fast two or three times a year now we do let them play in the water sometimes and so sometimes if they just get a little dirt on them sometimes just a little bit in the water will help and not being in soap or anything that'll keep them from stripping the oils in their coat which again keep them from ah smelling even worse and again keeps their coats very nice and healthy and pretty right are you pretty he's like mom I'm a boy I am NOT pretty now a lot of people wonder if you do give your ferrets a bath what should you use they do make ferrets shampoos but a lot of people that actually did not recommend these I don't usually recommend them you definitely don't want to use dog or cat shampoos those would definitely be too harsh for them now one of the things I've seen recommended that would probably be okay for them is baby shampoo baby shampoo for humans is made in a way that's very sensitive so that would probably be okay for them but the way that I would highly recommend doing is actually an oatmeal bath so this is just plain oatmeal plain dry oatmeal and what you would do is you would fill your bathtub up so if I'm sitting in and you take your oatmeal and you actually fill a sock with the oatmeal so nice clean sock and bear with me Tommy we're gonna put oatmeal into the sock and all over me all right and then you can tie your sock and after you fill your bathtub with water you can throw your little sock of oatmeal just in the bath with the water and that should do for a bath again they shouldn't need very much in actual washing when we give them a bath that's all I do is just a little oatmeal bath like that and again my guys smell amazing when we take them on outings again they go camping and hiking and I'm just outings with us all the time most people who want to pet and hold them the very first thing they do with them is take them to their nose and smell them yeah I'm sure you don't like it and it's kind of a weird thing but I get it one of the common myths on ferrets is that they're very smelly creatures and they really really aren't again a lot of people think ferrets smell and usually it's their own fault because they've accidentally given them too many baths and usually they do that because they think ferrets smell and so they start the process of giving them baths which causes them to start to smell because they're over producing the oils in the skin so they start to smell more and then they give him another bath to get rid of that smell which dries the skin out even further so it even over produces the oils even more which gets even smellier and then we give them another bath and it's basically a never ending cycle of a a really really stinky ferret Thank You Verret are you stinky ferret I know you're just being a very sleepy ferret so my number one tip to not having a smelly ferret is don't give them baths now usually when you bring up there at home for the first time especially like from a pet store or sometimes from a bad circumstance usually you're gonna have to give them one initial bath that is also the reasons why people have the misconception that these little guys smell usually the way pet stores keep them is one of the reasons why they smell it pet stores so no two pet stores and visit them and test them and play with them they do tend to be stinky they're the way that their enclosures are it's like an aquarium tank type habitat for them which most people don't recommend for ferrets it doesn't allow for good circulation of air to get in there and they have usually like a bedding throughout the whole thing so like in our cage we have a litter type bedding in just the litter boxes and then fleece throughout the rest of it everyone's digging so the difference is my boys tend to potty in their litter box and mostly not potty everywhere else while at the pet stores to them it's like a gigantic litter box because there's bed earthers like litter at least whatever the pet store uses the ferret seed litter throughout the whole thing so they just potty everywhere throughout the enclosure and then they walk through and lay and all of this litter which causes them usually to smell and again it's not really anyone's fault but that's why usually if you go to pet stores a lot of those ferrets will smell just because they're kind of laying in their own feces and urine unfortunately so usually when ferrets come home the first time I would definitely recommend a bath at one time just to get rid of that initial smell from that but after that they should not need baths more than a few times a year I would say I think I've read online that people say definitely no more than once a month I would even say that's way too much but again it's probably to depend on your circumstances so if you are not bathing your little ferret that much and you do still find that you have a stinky ferret and you're keeping up on cage cleaning cage cleaning obviously is gonna be your number two way to keep them smell free because if you let them roam around in their own feces and urine whether it's in the litter box or dirty bedding that's gonna cause him to be smelly but the third thing is actually their diet and I plan on doing a video on the best ferret diets out there in the future but the better diet you can get for them the actually the the less they will actually smell ferrets being obligate carnivores are actually supposed to be only meat-eaters so a lot of the actual ferret based foods out there that are targeted for ferrets are not good for them at all so when you're feeding them those kind of stuff that actually can cause them to smell a lot and I'll also have a lot to do with how nice their coats are we got hokey hokey was not on a very good diet and he was almost pretty bald and had definitely had smelled to him but after he switched over to our food he's got a berry if you can see fluffy coat now and he's actually been shedding a little bit so it's not quite as fluffy because we're going from winter to spring here in Michigan so he has lost some of his fluffiness but he was almost balding and you can see just by changing the dye at home it's nicer his coat looks I don't have really any video footage of how bad that he looked and we got him but but he looks so much better now huh huh my little old man old man just went down so basically all I had for you today was wanting to tell you that if you have to bathe your ferret not to bathe them very often and if you do bathe them make sure not to use a very strong shampoo so again a sock filled with oatmeal usually works just fine it's not usually a human grade baby shampoo who work as well all right so I think the boys are getting pretty bored and playing in just the bathtub for right now so if you'd like to see more ferret care type videos please give this video video a thumbs up and if you're not already subscribed to our channel please subscribe and hit that little notification bell so you get notifications and when we put out new videos thanks for watching