A friend wrote to me privately about someone misunderstanding my post
(which my friend had found perfectly clear) and I thought that she was
speaking about a private note she had gotten but I see it was here.

This is what I sent to my friend to share:

What I get pissed at are people who treat ANY food like religion, and I
get even more pissed at the ones who go beyond that and assume their
"religion" is the only acceptable one then nag and use cruelly imposed
guilt through false assertions to try to force others to go along with
them.

I feel the same way when people make false claims, abuse people, and
impose guilt upon people for any other reason, too.

The fact that one person doing that is a person who is relatively new
to ferrets is to illustrate that the person does NOT has a basis for
comparison and does NOT have any longevity data.

Yes, a number of my friends feed raw, feed a mix, or in some cases make
their own foods. THEY don't make false claims and try to misuse readers
with well written guilt-imposing posts, though. They know that any
balanced diet is fine, that no diet is perfect, and that each diet
has upsides and downsides.

Please, tell Darlene that those are my own words about why i lost
patience. Or if she posted instead of writing to you privately then
I will tell her

Please, do reassure her that we've had ferrets for 28 years and quality
kibbles DO provide happy, healthy, and long-lived ferrets.

She can see all of those words.

For the FML:

So, now people know why I got fed up, that it was not about the type of
diet but about the false claims and the fear that some people have been
generating. There is no reason for people like Darlene to incorrectly
fear for our ferrets. In fact, no one should be made that
uncomfortable. It is NOT KIND. We not only have the normal ones doing
extremely well, but even the ones we have taken in as "charity cases"
because they had very serious genetic malformations typically have made
it to 6 years of age. That is too young for a normal ferret (unless the
odds fall out in a bad way like when clumping lymphoma happens) but for
ones who most people could not keep alive beyond a year or so (per
assessments of treating and consulting vets) it is pretty danged good.

I do NOT like people manipulating list members with fear.

To each his or her own choice about food.

Sukie (not a vet)

Recommended ferret health links:
http://pets.groups.yahoo.com/group/ferrethealth/
http://ferrethealth.org/archive/
http://www.afip.org/ferrets/index.html
http://www.miamiferret.org/fhc/
http://www.ferretcongress.org/
http://www.trifl.org/index.shtml
http://homepage.mac.com/sukie/sukiesferretlinks.html

[Posted in FML 6241]