From:
meshouse@earthlink.net
Date: 2004-09-23 12:43:57 UTC
Subject: Lost first ferret
To: ferrethealth@smartgroups.com
Message-ID: <600799.1095943438006.JavaMail.root@thallium.smartgroups.com>
This is my fist time in writing to the list after being a member for years. We just lost a little girl ferret Monday morning who we estimate her age at 4.5 year old. We adopted her so we don't know her "real" age. She was happy, energetic and playful until Friday. I noticed she was having troubles moving her hind end. I thought she may have hurt herself playing with our other 2 ferrets as one is much bigger than she was, or had pulled something. That was her only symptom at the time.
Late Saturday she didn't want to eat any dry food or drink any water. She was not vomiting,foaming at the mouth, no blood, no seizures or anything, she didn't seem to have any pain, just looked tired. I started feeding her watered down duck soup and she ate almost the whole ice cube sized soup. I had fed her like that over the weekend to get her thru til Monday when we could go to the vets. She did have a couple of accidents out of the litter box, but most of the time she would go to the litter box still having troubles walking. Everything seemed normal looking when she used the litter box, no blood, no black, just normal.
Monday morning I get up to feed her noticed she had some black stools, and she is arched and having a lot of trouble holding her head up, kind of turning her head, breathing heavily...I could not open her mouth to feed her. As I was getting ready to grab her to go out the door to the vets I heard a loud kind of howl (last breath), and went to get her and she was gone.
This is my first ferret loss, and I have no idea what was wrong with her. Is this something that any of you ferret experts have seen before or maybe could be due to age or injury? She had always been high strung. From Friday to Monday was very quick to see in a ferret we thought was healthy.