From:
sukiec@optonline.net
Date: 2006-06-11 00:03:51 UTC
Subject: Re: [ferrethealth] RE: Ferret???
To: ferrethealth@smartgroups.com
At this age I'd be doubtful that he will ever be anything but small. Is one of those pictures him next to a littermate? If so, he is proportional and what in humans would have been called a "midget" years ago.
Small is not necessarily bad as long as it does not come with health problems, though he will get cold more easily than others.
Many small people are longer lived than others and when proportional there is less chance that there are the joint problems with some disproportionate form of dwarfism have. The idea of "bigger is better" does not necessarily hold for many aspects of health.
That people who are of smaller size (but without some of the health problems which can accompany some causes of small size) often live longer has been known for a long time, and it has been seen in other species, too.
Ex: <http://sciencecareers.sciencemag.org/career_development/previous_issues/articles/2520/the_mouse_that_roared/(parent)/12095>
START QUOTE
A decade ago, Andrzej Bartke, a Polish-born physiologist at Southern Illinois University (SIU) in Carbondale, was studying reproductive endocrinology in giant mice that had been engineered to overproduce human growth hormone. The brownish-gray rodents quickly grew "big and slick and nice," Bartke says, but he noticed that they started deteriorating early, at 7 months old. They began losing weight, grew sluggish, and developed problems in the spine, and their hair turned gray. Many of them dropped dead early, before age 1. The oversized mice seemed to grow old prematurely.
That observation set Bartke and two postdocs, Holly Brown-Borg and her husband Kurt Borg, wondering: If having too much growth hormone could make an animal age faster, perhaps having no growth hormone would postpone aging. Downstairs, the researchers maintained a colony of mice at the other end of the size spectrum: the Ames dwarf line, which Bartke had been studying since the '60s. The tiny creatures lacked growth hormone and insulin-like growth factor-1 (IGF-1). But no one knew whether they lived especially long...
Brown-Borg set aside a bunch of the miniature rodents and allowed them to live out their natural life spans. Three years later, in 1996, the researchers reported in Nature that Ames dwarf mice, which carry a mutation in a gene called Prop1, live 50% longer than normal mice. The paper was a landmark, demonstrating "that a single gene mutation in the mouse could extend life span,"...
END QUOTE
If all goes well this little guy may be with you a very, very long time.
My hopes are that he just has a fortuitous mutation and that you'll be getting tiny- tongue kisses for a very, very long time!
ONE CAUTION: Small size could make him more inclined to chil easily compared to other ferrets so in cold weather keep him sheltered well and if he needs to taken somewhere in winter provide a lot of blankets to snuggle in!
(BTW, on my Dad's side of the family with my being about 5'7" I am considered huge. My grandma was 4'8" and many relatives aren't much different from that, so i knew early on that small can be strong.
I hope that your little boy will be as fortunate.)
-- Sukie (not a vet, and not speaking for any of the below in my private posts)
Recommended health resources to help ferrets and the people who love them:
Ferret Health List
http://www.smartgroups.com/groups/ferrethealth
FHL Archives
http://ferrethealth.org/archive/
AFIP Ferret Pathology
http://www.afip.org/ferrets/index.html
Miamiferrets
http://www.miamiferret.org/fhc/
International Ferret Congress Critical References
http://www.ferretcongress.org
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