From:
sukiec@optonline.net
Date: 2005-07-19 15:53:44 UTC
Subject: RE: [ferrethealth] Dealing with an older ferret
To: ferrethealth@smartgroups.com
Message-ID: <7628958.1121788424564.JavaMail.root@thallium.smartgroups.com>
First: a couple of drops a day is not at all going to hurt them. The fears of Vitamin A toxicity have been larger than the risk. There are very few reports of even *possible* Vitamin A toxicity in ferrets.
We have had ferrets who -- depending on their sizes -- have had their daily Florinef dose in anywhere from 1/4 teaspoon of Ferretone to 1/2 teaspoon of Ferretone each day for years with no problems at all.
I do not know how the levels of assorted nutrients are in other supplements.
With vitamins a person usually thinks of the fat soluble vitamins in relation to getting too much, but -- in humans at least -- there can be problems with over-dosing of some water soluble ones such as C which can interfere with copper uptake and processing if in regular megadoses as well as having the potential for causing rebound scurvy if the person's body adjusts to high levels but then is dropped back to normal levels and which also can interfere in a bad way with radiation therapy for some types of tumors. B6 in megadoses with some people will produce many of the same symptoms as too little of it causes.
BUT THESE ARE NOT NARROW MARGINS; there is leeway.
To top it off, not everyone processes some nutrients as well as others so what would be a megadose for one person may be needed by another -- something which should not be self-diagnosed but left to the professionals to investigate.
Also, I do NOT know if ferrets get the same problems as humans can get with such megadoses or how much leeway they actually have before they are megadosed.
Sometimes worries are more of a tempest in a teapot that kind of gets established in a community than anything else, whereas other times they are based on experience, reliable multiple reports, or studies.
Secondly:
I am sorry about the way that Smartgroups wound up reconfiguring my post on the list and hope that everyone could tell what the person to whom I was replying wrote and what I I wrote.
Every once in a while Smartgroups gets a glitch where it loses spacing and then things can look weird.
I guess for now folks who reply to the posts of others by doing quoted sections and then their own replying sections had better inserts lines between the two Like this: _____ rather than just spaces between the text they are quoting and their own text because I can't report that failure since their reporting address is currently rejecting letters (a problem under discussion in the support group for moderators where hopefully Smartgroups has a fly on the wall), so until they fix their reporting addy we might be stuck with the spacing problem intermittently or even normally for a while.