Food for though and discussion
 
As Anonymous pointed out , a lot of breeders mate brother and sister,
father and daughter, when you read this it disgust's you, right?  Right.
Lets go back about ten years, A breeder in Sweden discovered that one of
his ferrets has a faulty gene, the fur on the back of it's legs is long
and there is no under fur.  Someone sees the possibility's here.  Now
a faulty gene is simply a mistake by Mother Nature, "Hey we all make
mistakes."  So you breed the ferrets again, but Mother Nature is awake
this time and makes the right selection, the kits have perfect fur.  Now
how do we go about stopping her from removing these faulty genes?  Well
we take the kits that have the long fur from the nest and strengthen the
gene by breeding them together, yes brother and sister.  You keep on
doing this until some where down the line you have the angora.  Problem
is you have strengthened the gene that makes the long fur, BUT, you have
also strengthen any other genes that were not as should be, lets say the
original kits also have a hereditary hart valve problem.  Well that has
been strengthened as well.  Thus you have a pretty angora ferret with a
BIG heart problem.
 
To give you an example, until a few years ago we seldom heard about deaf
ferrets in Holland, Then a breeder in Holland decided he would help the
new trend of wanting something different, He selected two Blaze ferrets,
from two different lines with no deaf ferrets known in either line.  What
he forgot was that, A the blaze was started the same way as the angora;
Strengthening the defect by inbreeding and B the e white markings are
possabley an indication of the Warrensburg syndrome.  Both ferrets had a
small amount of the Warrensburg syndrome, put them together and they have
a big Warrensburg syndrome.  He was very surprised that the kits were
deaf.
 
Now I am not a geneticist, I am only using my experience from having
grown up with animals and simple common sense, So Sukkie please don't
jump on me, but lets put it this way.  We wouldn't have our husband and
daughter have a child together just because they both have exceptionally
beautiful eyes, because we know that incest is not ethical and not
healthy, so why should it be acceptable with animals?  And yet well
stimulate breeders like Soren en Marshel farms, to do this all the
time, just to feed our need of something different.
 
Stephenie Netherlands
[Posted in FML issue 4798]