Here is info from some of the notes I took during the various lectures at
the Ferrets 2000 symposium.  I was often writing very fast, and my
handwriting is bad at the best of times, and I may have misinterpreted
speakers comments, so if anyone has any corrections, please feel free to
jump in.
 
Dr Tom Williard of Performance Foods spoke about nutrition.  I'm very
interested in nutrition, so I took a lot of notes.  He was also the first
speaker, so I wasn't tired then!
 
Dr Williard said there are at least 10 grades of chicken by-product meal
available to pet food manufacturers.  The lowest grades may contain up to
25% ash, while the best have 8-10%.  Totally Ferret food uses the best
quality available.  Meat meal is very high in ash.  I believe he also said
they recently changed to a better grade of egg product.  In developing TF,
they tested protein levels of 28-40%, and their measures (which included
growth rates, packed cell volumes of blood and maybe other stuff I forgot),
showed no improvement over about 34-35%, so they settled on 36% for the
final formulation.
 
They also found 22-25% fat optimal for growth, 18-21 for maintenance.
Ferrets can digest about 95% of the fat in chicken fat, 92% in poultry
fat, and 80% of animal fat.
 
Rice flour is the most expensive carbohydrate source and is among the
lowest in fiber.  Low is good since ferrets can only digest about 5% of the
fiber in the foods they eat.  Dogs can digest about 50% and cats 25-30%.
Brown rice and whole wheat, while they may be good for us, are higher in
fiber which is not good for ferrets.  Potato flour is also low in fiber,
but not always available to manufacturers.  Other "bad" carbohydrates are
soy, corn gluten, sorghum and oat flour.  Corn, brewers rice, wheat and
corn flour are medium in quality.
 
Because ferrets have such a short colon, they do not reabsorb a lot of the
water from their food before it becomes poop.  They drink about 12% of
their body weight in water per day, which is almost twice that of cats.
 
One more nutrition thing: Dr Karen Purcell was not an official presenter,
but she contributed a lot of wonderful information and insightful comments,
especially medical.  (By the way, she looks and acts NOTHING like her
picture in her book!)  I asked her about her views on chromium and brewers
yeast supplements.  Many use it in their duck soup recipes, especially for
insulinomic recipes, because it supposedly "regulates" blood sugar levels,
lowering them if high and raising them if low.  But Dr Karen says that
recent well done studies have shown that chromium will lower blood glucose
BELOW normal in dogs and cats.  Cat blood chemistry is very similar to
ferrets, and Dr Karen no longer recommends its use, ESPECIALLY in
insulinomic ferrets.
 
This is getting pretty long, so I'll post more tomorrow.  Hope this gets
through!
 
Linda Iroff
Oberlin OH
[Posted in FML issue 3179]