To Anne Charbonneau:
 
>Question about milk:
>    I was surprised to read that Dave from UK gives drops of milk to
>ferrets and that Hillary gave milk and cream to kitten.  I thought that
>milk induce diarrhea in ferret!?!
 
    Drops of milk probably won't do much in a ferret.  You need a little
more.
 
    The reason that cats and ferrets get diarrhea from milk is that when
they are weaned, and no longer get regular dosease of milk, they lose the
enzymes needed to digest it.  So the milk sugar just sits undigested in the
GI tract, and actually draws water into the gut to dilute the concentration.
This is known as an osmotic diarrhea.  But if this ferret has had milk all
its life, it would still have those enzymes and would have no problem with
it...
 
    If you're as old as I am, you probably remember collecting pennies for
UNICEF.  UNICEF would then buy powdered milk and send it to impoverished
African countries.  Well, a lot of these people did not consume milk as
their normal diet, so when they drank it, they got diarrhea, and thought the
Americans were trying to poison them....I think it ended up in the fields as
fertilizer...
 
Bruce H. Williams, DVM         Dept. of Veterinary Pathology
Chief Pathologist, AccuPath    Armed Forces Institute of Pathology
[log in to unmask]         Washington, D.C.  20306-6000
                               [log in to unmask]
[Posted in FML issue 1240]