Hi.  I have been working at the Worcester Cat Hospital and Bird Clinic
since October and am now training to be a vet tech (yay!) to support my
singing career.  (Might as well love your day job!).
 
Anyhoo, I have found an even easier way to preserve and then serve ferret
soup (aka duck soup) to your fuzzbutt if they don't eat it all on their
own or if you need to ensure (hahaha-if you use Ensure in your duck soup,
you get this pun) they are eating a certain amount/keep tabs on how much
they are eating.
 
Your vet might give/sell you some of these, or you can order them from a
medical supply place or online, but if you can get a bunch of feeding
syringes (I use the large 10 cc ones) with caps, enough to accomodate your
whole ferret soup batch, here's what I do and what we do at the hospital:
 
Make up a batch of ferret soup in your blender-use whatever recipe you
prefer-and then strain it to get out bits of kibble too big to fit thru
the syringe (my blender does a great job, but there are always a few small
pieces that aren't quite small enough).  Then take your bunch of feeding
syringes, fill them all, rinse the excess from the outside and place a cap
on each syringe to keep the food from leaking out.  Place all the full
syringes in a large ziplock freezer bag or other freezer-safe container
and freeze the food in the syringes.
 
When you're ready to feed, take a frozen syringe out, place it tip down
(the cap will keep it from leaking as it thaws) in a cup of HOT water for
a few minutes to thaw, then shake and feed.  The temperature should be
perfect after sitting in the hot water (not too hot, as may happen in the
microwave) and you skip the messy and sometimes wasteful step of thawing
a cube (I used to use ice cube trays, but find this MUCH easier) then
sucking it up into the syringe.  The soup separates less than with the
heat-then-fill-syringe method and it saves room in the freezer, too, as it
is much easier to fit in a bag of syringes than have extra ice cube trays.
 
Just an idea for an alternative!
 
-April
[Posted in FML issue 3659]