From:
sukieferret
Date: 2002-02-17 16:07:00 UTC
Subject: Re: Tap Water or Spring Water
> question is, are they getting too much light? Should they be
> covered at night, or even during the day? They're not in direct
> light
No one knows.
Providing hours of full darkness is like any other hypothesis -- it
is a question which has been brought to attention because of a
possible pattern, but no one knows if it means anything at all till
it is tested.
Some really promising looking things fall flat on their faces once
tested, but others have the kind of support which makes them
take off and gain a huge degree of respect and utilization (and
thus are reputaitons and sometimes fortunes made...).
That's the same as the water-discussion, or the possibility that
there could a predisposing virus for some adrenal growths, or...
(The list of hypotheses could go on long enough to make any of
us doze off, some of which will pan out and some of which will
not.)
Hypotheses are functionally questions (even if in a statement
form) based upon observations so far made. Some of them are
useful once they are studied and some aren't. That's why it's
important to know the testing background of any changes in day
to day treatments, meds, surgeries, tests, etc. even though
much just winds up being done like many things in life -- without
study.
Without study and testing any claims made are nothing more
than empty words, so I'll say that we provide our ferrets with
nights of full darkness and very dark places to sleep in the day
as they wish, but does it mean that we are doing something
useful? Not necessarily. The idea is based on a lot of past
studies of internally-produced melatonin over more than a
decade, but it might not have any functional outcome in ferrets.
No way to know at this point. I'm not going to take the
accept-it-on-faith route and say that it's based on these studies
so it must have merit. It might, or it might have none at all, but it's
easy enough to do with covers, so we do it just in case. ( On the
other hand, if an actual study shows that it makes a diiference
I'd like to buy into black fabric dye as an investment before it
takes off big time like test-supported claims tend to do when
there is a need to fill.)