I also will say Marshall's is not the bad culprit its made out to be
and has some advantages over other farms in how they bred/raise their
kits - most of the MF kits are gentler natured and easier to work with
unless they get mistreated at the petstore. Some of the others have not
handled theirs as much and it really shows by the time they make their
way through the chain to get to your home. Even at the petstore they
are wild and more bittified.

Yes the rescues are full but I also heard from 3 Petstores here that
their orders for more kits is on back order - MF can't breed enough
to fill the demand. Is that MF's fault? I don't think so. They are
filling a demand and believe you me, you don't want to knock out an
organization that has their knowledge know how and set up to turn it
over to the public to have "puppy mills" raising the ferrets. By this
time, most all of you have heard of the terrible things going on
breeding dogs in tin sheds, wire cages stacked on top of each other,
never cleaned, soured water and food, no medical treatment for diseases
or injuries much else normal grooming of ear cleaning and nail
clipping.

For patting Petsmart on the back, have you all forgotten not so very
long ago Petsmart was selling ferrets for 5 years and bought theirs
from a very unrepeatable breeder Peta investigated. They showed the
horrors of how that farm treated their animals - still up on U-Tube.
Petsmart got them to turn the breeders over to us after they sold half
on auction. Out of those 76, we hah over 20 die or be treated for
horrible heart conditions, a defect we could only guess from possible
inbreeding when the whole males were left with the females to bred at
will. There were no records as to who mama or daddy were, just came
to us all together and some of the males were injured from fighting.
Out of the 76, we had only 2 show any signs of adrenal but the other
problems were staggering as we expected these to be far healthier than
the MF kits. We kept track of who they went to and found many died of
heart failure either in surgery or after a long treatment of the
disease or just being found dead. We found lots of respiratory problems
and digestive problems plus having to have surgery on protruding
rectums that reallllllly turned inside out. For this many problems with
these few of ferrets, no they were not a healthy lot at all.

Getting MF to work with the public is the way to fight most of the ills
we have to face. It will not stop the people from buying on impulse or
stop them from giving them up when they find they require so much time
and expense to maintain. Educate the public is the answer but how do
you do that if people remain as impulsive as they have been for
generations. Your target should be petstores get them to provide enough
brochures to explain the ups and downs - we tried working with Petco to
educate their sales people but they have such a high turn over, we
couldn't keep up with it. I can only hope that MF will get more people
on board to make the pendulum swing back to working with everyone again
and maybe they can help with educating potential buyers.

Millie and her ferrets and Danes
www.txferretrescue.org 

[Posted in FML 6808]