From:
sukiec@optonline.net
Date: 2004-03-23 15:04:34 UTC
Subject: RE: Ferret Feeding
To: ferrethealth@smartgroups.com
Message-ID: <5521224.1080054274667.JavaMail.root@thallium.smartgroups.com>
>food. Sid lived longer than any ferret I've had since and he never had either >adrenal disease or insulinoma. What does that mean? Who knows. Luck I guess
> because it couldn't have been the food.
I've wondcered at times about this, having had similar experiences with very low quality food decades ago and know a number of others with similar results from then, and have an idea, but it is only that.
First off, I DO think that more digestible foods make sense and that they can potentially have health benefits such as reducing GI tract irritation
BUT
specifically because it is more digestible it is easier for bored ferrets or those who aren't getting enough exercise to become obese.
Then it usually becomes cyclical because obesity itself further reduces exercise.
In a huge number of species a person can find study after study linking low exercise levels, low muscle mass levels, or high body fat levels (or some combination of these) to an enormous number and range of health problems: from hormonal and endocrinological ones, to increased malignancy rates, to increased rates of stress, to increased rates of circulatory disease, to increased amounts of intestinal woes, to decreases in mental accuity which seem to be partly related to biredom and partly to circulatory damage, and so on.
There have even been studies in the heavy but fit showing that muscle mass displaces a number of the negative effects of having a lot of fat tissue at some levels in multiple species.
On looking at people's pictures of ferrets and hearing a lot of commnets on the athletic abilities of a number of our's I really have to wonder if what is at times being seen amounts to a "couch potato" effect. There seem to be a lot of fat and indolent ferrets out there.
It would seem, if this is a reasonable conjecture, that a combination of feeding a highly digestible diet but providing enough exercise that the animals have good muscle mass and reduced stress levels might be a winning combination for improved health.