Dear Stephen,
 
I understand your decision to be a vegetarian, but ferrets are carnivores.
God made them to eat meat.  There are more than just vitamins that are in
meat to make it different from a vegetarian diet.  The chemistry is complex
and no one understands it fully, so I urge you to please not feed your
ferrets a vegetarian diet.  I know a guy that wanted to feed his cats a
vegetarian diet, also because he was a veggie.  He mixed and mixed until he
came up with something his nine cats would all eat and that he felt was
nutricious as well.  One by one, his cats all went blind!  The mix was
missing a key enzyme that is ONLY found in meat.  Much less is known about
ferrets and their special needs.
 
I am not saying that no products exist that improve a vegetarian mix to be
more complete, but just as vitamins in pill form are far less valuable to
the body, so are these products.  If they _are_ just as absorbable and
contain the same extracts, enzymes, vitamins, etc., then they are extracted
from meat and you are defeatin the purpose of what you are trying to do.
Some things we can only get from veggies.  Some things we can only get from
meat.  Ferrets are not vegetarians, nor are they omnivores, but carnivores.
That is just how they were designed.
 
Thanks,
D
[Posted in FML issue 1737]