Still, millions of years of evolution, thousands of years of
domestication, and hundreds of years of modern science notwithstanding,
there is obviously some risk to eating bone, or we wouldn't be here.  Any
discussion of risk is bound to have emotional undertones; even if the
chance that you will be struck by lightning is seven million to one, for
that single person it is devastating.  It is important to understand a
discussion of risk is not meant to minimize the emotional impact of such
sudden and devastating unintentional injury or death.
 
It is also extremely important to understand the everyday nature of
risk -- people who decry placing ferrets at risk by allowing them to
express such natural behaviors as chewing bone will place themselves AND
their ferrets in danger just driving to the vet.  Driving to the vet is
RISKY.  The USA DOT reported that for the year 2001, 42,116 traffic
fatalities out of a population of roughly 284,796,887 (2000 USA census),
with slightly larger numbers for 2002 (preliminary estimate = 42,850).
This means for the two years combined, 1 out of 6704 people would have
died in their car, with about a 42% chance that death would be alcohol
related.  This statistic doesn't address your chance of a non-fatal auto
accident, a far greater risk of occurrence, and possibly injurious or
deadly to ferrets.  These are tremendous long shots compared to the risks
of smoking; according to the AMA, smokers have about 1 chance in 3 that
they will develop one or more devastating smoking-related diseases within
their lifetime.  At 1:3, you would have better odds playing Russian
roulette.  Interestingly, there are no published scientific reports
that prove bone-eating is risky for ferrets, but at least three have
demonstrated ferrets are at extreme risk from second-hand smoke.  Yet,
ferret owners who are shocked at the very prospect of feeding bone to a
ferret will still puff away in front of them.  The point is, for most
people risk is not measured in statistical probabilities, but rather in
perceived peril.
 
What is the actual (absolute) risk associated with a ferret eating bone?
That is difficult to say since there are no known data quantifying the
number of ferrets eating bone, the number of ferrets that eat bone having
problems, or even an accurate number of ferrets in America for that
matter.  ANY numeric estimate would be a guess, making the determination
of absolute risk impossible.  Still, with the knowledge that feeding
ferrets bone-containing foods has been the standard for the last 25
centuries, and the number of confirmed reports that ferrets have died
from consuming bone are quite small, we can safely assume the absolute
risk of such practices would also be exceedingly small.  In other words,
while we cannot determine the numeric value for the absolute risk of
injury from eating bone, we know that statistically, it would be quite
small.
 
There is another way of assigning risk.  We can compare one set of
phenomenon to another, ignoring actual numbers and just looking at the
overall chance of any one particular activity resulting in harm.  This
is an exercise in relative, rather than absolute risk.  For example, the
absolute risk of being injured playing professional football during a
career is 100%, but the relative risk for the average American may rank
somewhere above pulling a muscle while blinking and below hurting
yourself playing a game on the X-Box.  Relative risk is a hierarchy of
possible injuries that indicate nothing more than the likelihood of being
injured doing one thing is more or less than doing another.  For example,
in the population as a whole, a ferret is more likely to be hurt from
being accidentally stepped on than from slipping unnoticed into a
dishwasher.  Relative risk ignores how many people shuffle through herds
of ferrets, or how many own dishwashers.  It also ignores the actual
number of occurrences, only being worried about the distinction of "more"
or "less." Since more ferret injuries and deaths are reported from being
stepped on compared to those by dishwasher, we can safely say that within
a given population the relative risk of injuring or killing a ferret by
stepping on them is higher than from dishwasher trauma.
 
Bob C
[Posted in FML issue 4156]