Written by Lexi Foley

It was an average Chattanooga afternoon for six-month-old Turbo as he scurried across the walking bridge, chasing each new scent. Rays of sunlight fought to peak out of the clouds as a hawk flew through the sky. Turbo flicked his black and white head forward and backward as he followed the hawk’s flight pattern. A group of bicycles came rolling across the bridge, stealing the young ferret’s attention for just long enough before a collection of teenagers strolled past him. 

His noodle-like body winded like a river as he explored one of Chattanooga’s most popular attractions: the Walnut Street Bridge. The bridge is one of many spots Turbo will visit throughout the year, along with pop-up markets, Rock City, the Commons, etc. Since he was adopted in October of 2023, Turbo has become a beacon of light for anyone willing to stop and say “hi”. Although Turbo was adopted by owners Jonah and Kat Aberle to be a public service to the greater Chattanooga community, the Aberles originally got a ferret from their local PetSmart for their college home in Cookeville.

Jonah and Kat lived with six roommates in a house comparable to the size of Shrek’s shack when it came to extra space.  It fit all the college students perfectly, but adding a dog or cat would have left their roommates feeling like Shrek felt when Donkey first arrived. The two were left with a dilemma: what kind of pet could they adopt without infringing on their roommates’ lives? 

The idea of Banjo was born. 

Banjo was the pair’s first ferret. He was perfect. Small enough to be confined to their bedroom, but far more playful than a goldfish. Long periods—almost 20 hours—of a ferret’s day are spent sleeping, and for a short while, Banjo could be placed in a crate. The mustelid—commonly but wrongly thought to be rodents—was the missing piece to the now trio of adventurers.

“We felt that ferrets had the most personality for an animal this size,” Jonah said. 

For Banjo, personality went hand in hand with exploring. Because his body could fit into any place his head could squeeze through, he was able to appear and disappear like a robber in a bank. Jonah and Kat’s roommates loved Banjo. They had an adorable new pet without having to worry about caring for him or finding him. The little ferret would rummage around the couple’s bedroom like his own personal playground and sometimes found phenomenal hiding places. 

But just outside their miniature playground paid for in monthly college rent and utilities was an amusement park free of charge. 

The great outdoors became the best compromise for an already adventurous couple and their curious pet. During an hour or so he was awake—as he was only awake for about four hours a day—Banjo would enjoy walks around the Tennessee Tech campus with Jonah and Kat. To their surprise, numerous students stopped and asked to meet the third member of their family. 

Led by his snout, Banjo would take his parents on walks to find new friends. Vast grasses of green were Banjo’s favorite place to roll his flexible body. He invited friends from all parts of campus to pay him a visit outside, and after a year of exploring Cookeville, invited strangers from all walks of life to meet him in Chattanooga. 

Chattanooga was full of wild new smells, the smell of rotten trash with a hint of polluted water was a perfume sprayed across parts of the city, the grass seemed to be wet a bit more often, and there were many more friends to greet in the new town.  

By year four of his life, Banjo was becoming a local legend. He was known by many locals and became a familiar face for some. His Instagram account had grown to more than 100 followers which, for a pet, is a substantial amount of fans. 

“Banjo inadvertently became an ambassador for the ferret species and a source of joy for us and all the lovely friends he met on his adventures,” Jonah said. 

Each outing of Banjo’s led to a new friend, but those friends came and went after only one interaction. It was difficult for word of mouth and a quick username swap to be the only way to maintain his constantly growing network of friends. With his growing popularity, came a new idea from the now engaged couple. 

How often does a person meet a ferret? 

It’s an odd experience for most, and a memorable one for certain. Often Banjo would re-meet someone from long ago who had met him a year ago and still remembered their first meeting. So the couple decided to create a momento for people to have when they met Banjo. 

The business card was born.

We wanted to create a way for people to take a piece of their experience home with them, Kat explained. It was an easy way for people to get in touch with the whereabouts of Banjo through Instagram and take a piece of him wherever they went. Some people reported putting the cards on their mirrors, in their phone cases, or on the dash of their cars.

It wasn’t anything too complicated. A pocket-sized rectangle that could easily fit into a wallet or purse, the small piece of card stock featuring a clipped-out photo of Banjo’s head and the rising star’s Instagram handle. The card read “You’ve Just met Banjo!” Each card featured a picture of the cute little guy on different adventures in various poses on the back of it. It was like baseball cards for Banjo, a collectible piece of memorabilia for free. 

The only thing it cost was a couple minutes of the day. 

Having multiple versions of the cards was also an encouragement for people to approach Banjo again if they happened to run into him a second time. Catch them all, right? Same mindset as Pokémon, just with Banjo’s business cards. 

While Banjo was a positive addition to Chattanooga, he was an even bigger part of Jonah and Kat’s lives. Just as any other pet becomes a part of the family, Banjo was with the couple in the pages of two chapters of their lives. The high school sweethearts adopted Banjo as they reached the last chapter of their college experience. Banjo had a front row seat to the stresses and celebrations of senior year. He watched his parents study for hours during finals weeks, only to disappear for an hour before coming back with satisfied grins on their faces. As they figured out their next steps of life, Banjo found a new bed in the towel drawer of a rental room whose lease was about to end. When the couple decided to pack their bags for a new time zone south of Tennessee’s equator, he curled up in a ball and slept through the ride there. 

Along the way, Banjo enjoyed kayak rides through the Tennessee River, visits to marketplaces and restaurants, and hikes through the Tennessee mountains. He saw gorgeous oranges and pinks as the sun set and hues of gray and white dot a sky of vibrant blue. Every patch of grass was an opportunity for a good back massage, every spot of dirt a good digging section.

He watched from the comfort of a new house as Jonah and Kat stopped calling each other boyfriend and girlfriend and started using a strange new word—fiancé—instead. And then there was the day Kat took time to look extra beautiful, clothed in a white gown adorned with lace, just to walk down a petal-covered aisle. Banjo listened to the click of a new machine Kat used to sew up fabric and watched in amusement as she tried piece on after. His new friend, Kazooie, purred alongside him as they helped Jonah with his stress as he trained to become a licensed Emergency Medical Technician and comforted him when he got home from a graveyard shift caring for seizure patients. 

The tiny ferret sat in the corner of the Aberle’s lives as they grew and hit milestone after milestone of their young adulthood. 

So when Banjo got lymphoma at the age of six, it broke the hearts of his parents. The two watched as Banjo slowly lost his life. His blood sugar became scary high as his spleen swelled on June 26. By June 29, 2023, he crossed the rainbow and passed from Earth. The couple alerted Banjo’s fans of his death, and the response was overwhelming. 

It’s common for people to have less sympathy for someone when their pet dies. After all, it was just an animal…

But when they saw his obituary post, Banjo’s friends were adamant he was not just an animal. 

“I was JUST talking to a friend of mine about meeting him at the TN Aquarium and how it was definitely a core memory,” Rachel Patton commented. “Much love for him, thank you for sharing him with the world.”  

And they didn’t stop at commenting on a post. As news spread of his passing, people reached out to Jonah and Kat, going as far as making a card with signatures and condolences covering the inside. People shared their favorite memories with Banjo and touched the hearts of his parents. 

“He was basically the Brad Pitt of ferrets.” – Rachel. “Banjo will always live in our hearts. Rest in Power.” – Tane. “You aren’t dead Banjo, your energy goes on in our lives forever and is in us and around us.” – David L. 

Banjo wasn’t just a novelty or interesting photo opportunity. He impacted people. He made the Chattanooga community a better place every time he wandered around the city. 

Banjo had become a symbol of  joy and hope for the body of people brave enough to approach him.

“While the friends Banjo made would often remind us what he was, I didn’t fully appreciate how great a gift was returned in their appreciation of him [Banjo],” Jonah said. 

The community surrounding Banjo became a community surrounding Jonah and Kat in their grief. It was a comfort to know how much the people Banjo interacted with cared for him. 

After his death, Kat and Jonah spread Banjo’s ashes across Chattanooga in all his favorite places to visit. A part of Banjo remains at the Yellow Deli, Mellow Mushroom, Coolidge Park, Main Terrain Art Park, Feed Table and Tavern, a flower bed near Broad St. and W 6th St., and Bragg Reservation Park. So when his parents missed him, they could revisit his favorite places to go. 

But revisiting a memory wasn’t enough. 

“Kat and I missed sharing our happy little guy with the world deeply,” Jonah said, “and we knew we would need to continue the legacy through another ferret.”

This time the two researched more about ferret health and life span. The average lifespan of a ferret is five to ten years. But if you adopt the ferret from a pet store—like PetSmart—a ferret’s life span can shorten to four years or less. Most ferrets who are in pet stores have been exposed to animal testing before they were given to pet stores. Those experiments increase the susceptibility of lymphoma and other diseases for the ferret.

More educated than their college selves, Jonah and Kat decided to adopt a ferret from a breeder. The journey wasn’t as simple as picking up a ferret in Chattanooga. Ferret breeders are uncommon, and there were none in Chattanooga. 

The couple found a breeder in New York called Sugar and Spice Ferretry. It’s is a small company, founded in 2022, as said on its website, that focuses on breeding ferrets with “excellent structure, proper muscle mass, and increased genetic variation.” The company focuses on creating “fine and thoughtful examples of hardy ferrets,” meaning the lifespan of a ferret adopted from a specialized breeder would increase the likelihood of a longer life for their next ferret. 

So Kat hopped on a plane at 3:00 a.m. for Syracuse, New York to meet Turbo’s breeders. There was no way for her to fly Turbo back on the plane, so she rented a car, and after over 900 miles and two days of driving, Turbo was home with the Aberles. 

Turbo has taken the baton from Banjo and ran with it. He is now able to be an ambassador for the ferret population in Chattanooga, just like Banjo was. Not only is Turbo able to brighten people’s days, he is also able to continue breaking down the stigma some people have about ferrets being oversized rats. Jonah and Kat have returned to many of Banjo’s favorite places with Turbo and continue to give their pet as a public service for people. 

“Ferrets look a lot cuter in person,” Jon Estes said. “They move in such a cute way!” 

Interacting with strangers in public probably means one of two things: someone got in the other person’s way, or someone wants something from someone else. Often when someone is giving something out in public, they want something in return. A church table offering coffee, hoping people who stop by might be interested in coming to church, a vendor selling clothes or jewelry, a musician with their case open beside them as they perform for the public. None of these things are inherently bad, but they are services in exchange for something else. 

Turbo’s presence in public is purely for an exchange of joy. 

Jonah bent Turbo like a hot dog bun, showing a teenage girl how flexible he is as she laughed at Turbo’s perplexed face. Kat grabbed a bottled treat out of her backpack for Turbo, who licked it with glee. The girl held him the way a mother holds her baby as he folded himself in half again. Turbo rolled himself over and climbed around to her shoulder. Her friends snapped a couple of photos before she handed Turbo back to Jonah.

“This made my day,” she said. “Thank you.” There was a skip in her step as she and her friends walked slowly away, hovered around a phone. 

A woman biked past with a cat in her backpack, but slowly backpedaled as she saw the strangest thing on the bridge: an otter-ish animal on land. Her husband followed her, amusement grew on his face with each pedal. 

“Wow, an even stranger creature than our cat in a bag,” she said.

Turbo and the cat sniffed each other as the woman’s kids came cruising across the bridge to see what was holding their parents up. Their eyes grew four sizes when they saw Turbo. 

“Can I hold him?” the girl asked.

The woman took a photo of both of her kids holding their new friend. Jonah offered a unique business card to each of the kids. This time the card read: “You’ve Just Met Turbo! @Turbo.Ferret” and had a unique photo of Turbo’s most recent adventures on the back. They thanked Jonah and Kat and rode off, the girl looking back twice. 

The objective of Turbo is as simple as a child’s objective on the playground. There’s no hidden agenda from Turbo or his parents. No hope for profit. No goals to start a ferret army. No political skews. 

Just a ferret bringing smiles to the faces of Chattanooga. 

“He’s adventuring around Chattanooga every weekend meeting everyone he can and spreading joy just like his predecessor,” Jonah said. 

---

Meet the Storyteller