Message Number: YG13467 | New FHL Archives Search
From: sukieferret
Date: 2002-06-02 11:40:00 UTC
Subject: Re: The Food Issue

> Having lived with ferrets for such a long time (17+ years) ...

>We all fed our ferrets cat and kitten foods...

> that died in the upper years with the lowest being 8 and the
>rest in the double digit ranges. None of us did anything special
...
> The ferrets were all neutered and descented
> when we bought them.

We had ferrets then, too. Some of our's made 8 and older then,
but in looking back through the actual numbers in our household
rather than relying on memory the mode (most common) and
average ages of death here were lower than now, but not by a huge amount. Still, we had oldsters and we didn't even have access to good cat food let alone beging before ferret food back then.

For reference the most common age for ferret in our household now to die is late 7th into middle 8th year and we have almost all resuces who came to use with health, or abuse, backgrounds, or a combination, and have had ones with deformities. Those are firm ages since -- with a few exceptions -- we take them in as kits and I am not counted the ones with estimated ages in this figure.

With one exception all of our's then were early neuters. The exception was a retired breeder.

We did NOT see early adrenal growths. Just didn't. (We still
dont' get a lot of the early ones and 3 years is the earliest we've
had but that was 2 or 3 years ago.) Actually, adrenal growths in
general were not seen much around us back then, quite rare.

Insulinoma was just called "hypoglycemia" back then, and we
have never had a lot of that in out households (and we do give
raisins as treats a bit). Either we have been lucky or maybe something like our not giving carbohydrate treats, or providing many hours of time for exercise plays into it.

I personally tend to be inclined toward a possible viral precursor
which is more inclined to have effects on early neuters for
adrenal enoplasia, but that's just a favored hypothesis and
nothing more.

One thing that HAS changed markedly over the years is that the
proportion of fancies, especially of pigment depleted forms of
fancies has increased a LOT, and the percentage in the breeding
population is so large that it would not be a surprise if many who
do not show signs of such mutations still silently carry some
alleles. We simply do not know many of the ways in which some
of these might affect things like health and longevity, esp. if multiple ones are in the same individual.

It would be interesting if those in areas which did not have many
fancies until recently follow such lines for health and longevity
data in comparison to other ferrets.

17 to 20 years ago fancies were very rare in the U.S.