Two quick notes:
 
1. If you need to prove the safety of ferrets then you need the info which
Dick Bossart, Troy Lynn Eckart, and Jeanne Carley have.  The packets are
very comprehensive and cost only about what it costs them to make copies
and mail them out, but these folks are doing this on a volunteer basis so
timing is going to have to suit their schedules since they already have
more than full lives even before all their ferret work.
 
Be sure to go to the AVMA website http://www.avma.org (where the ferret
section itself is supposed to finally get the updates this summer which
were voted in last summer) and copy the Compendium of Animal Rabies
Control (which they do tend to put up, thank goodness), and also to go to
http://www.cdc.gov/epo/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/00056176.htm
 
You might want to see if the AFA has anything posted right now which will
be useful: http://www.ferret.org , ditto for http://www.ferretnews.org
 
2.  For years I have been trying to track down lines of ferrets which have
longer than average lifespans and have not been successful.  It seems that
the very old ones are sporadic individuals from the entire range of
breeders small and large.  Nor have I been able to locate any of those with
VERIFIABLE ages over something like 11 or 12 (Forget the actual age since
it was quite a while ago.).  A large number of reported extreme oldsters
have approximated ages which turned out to not mesh with vet records (i.e.
owners thought they had been there longer than they had), or ages which
were guesstimates because they were adoptees so could not be taken as firm
ages for obvious reasons.  (BTW, if memory serves in this case, I think
that Bob's ferret had a guesstimated age at adoption and by adding on each
year from that Bob came up with something like 13 as a guesstimate when the
dear was lost which is a lot more feasible than 17 and is likely to have a
slush factor of two to a few years.) I, too, have heard of the more extreme
reports as well as some reports of lone-lived lines (early on used to get
very excited about the first and still jump to check when I hear of the
second) but they just have not panned out on closer checking -- not in
either case.  Sorry.
 
Sukie
 
P.S.  Who has chatted to Julia Hirchberg about me?  Steve came home
yesterday and said that she'd come up to him at a meeting and said
something along the line of having heard of some of my ferret work in the
past and that she was "sure glad that Sukie hasn't turned her powers to
evil use".  Whoever you are, I feel like I need a mask and cape!  Ta Da!
Look, up in the sky it's...
[Posted in FML issue 2663]