From:
sukieferret
Date: 2002-03-18 19:21:00 UTC
Subject: Re: Zevron on ferret longevity and disease
Marie, sounds familiar.
You are encountering different diseases in Sweden than we do here in the U.S. but you meniton the same life spans of typically 7 or 8 years (some older, some younger). Also, you are wondering if some of the fancies are reducing health, longevity, or perhaps both which is also being wondered by some here, including me. The marked increase in such genetic groupings is scary because as they are artificially selected for the proportion of those alleles in the breeding population increases.
It sounds like you are used to the diseases that you are encountering there and have adjusted to them; for the most part people here who are used to ferrets and use resources seem to feel the same way about the diseases here. We'd all -- in any nation -- prefer fewer diseases and longer longevity but we sure do learn how to cope with which diseases are most often diagnosed in our ferrets, and we may gripe but we also deal.
With most mammals after a certain age it's more likely that SOMETHING will affect health, and 7 or 8 seems to be in that age range.
The disease distributions are interesting.
I read a report on an interesting bit ot research recently which indicated that aging may be a natural side effect of the exact same processes that prevent malignancies at early ages. They even wound up with a mouse line that produced more of the malignancy-fighting factors but aged prematurely and died young from other health problems that also increase with age. Silver lining to the storm cloud , or storm cloud to the silver lining -- however a person prefers realizing that the good comes with the bad.