I recently became the adoptive daddy to a 10 week-old tom kitten. He was a stray in my GF’s neighborhood, and I am (as she so lovingly puts it) a sucker 
So, now I have a cat. The problem is that I also have two ferrets that I got when they were kits and have lived with me in (more or less) domestic tranquility for the past two years.
The ferrets are extremely curious about the new addition to the household, and keep coming up to the kitten to give him a sniff. The kitten responds with a swift smack across the nose…rinse and repeat five to ten times. Alternatively, kitty will stalk and pounce on the ferrets as they pass by, doing whatever important ferret things that ferrets are always running around doing. One of my ferrets gets the message, and just tries to avoid the kitten for the most part, but the other one (a bit of a bully) gets annoyed after having his friendly greeting rebuffed in such a rude fashion (five or ten times), and proceeds to beat the tar out of the kitten. I then have either: squalling kitty that must be rescued, or squalling kitty (having made good his own escape) rocketing around my condo at approximately Mach 2.5. This little drama happens roughly every twenty minutes or so during the ferret’s two- to four-hour “out of cage” playtime. Evidently all of my pets have short-term memory problems.
Now, I’m not really concerned about the kitten hurting my lil’ stinky boys right now; a three pound adolescent kitten is no match for a three pound adult ferret - but an adult cat might be a different story. I would be very happy if kitty would learn that ferrets are for fun, not for fighting. To this end I have been fairly liberal with the water spritzer whenever kitty gets aggressive toward the ferrets, but have met with limited success - see above comment re: short term memory deficit.
So, does anyone else have ferrets and cats living together in relative harmony, or am I in for a long, disappointing decade?
