Quick and Dirty,

From a different than usual perspective, consider just for a brief
moment what's happened to that chunk of kibble that got chewed,
swallowed and made it all the way to the neighborhood of RAN.

RAN is the acronym for the end of the road, Quick and Dirty, defined as
the neighborhood of Rectum, Anus, and Nates.

As has been said, the music goes 'round and 'round and comes out here.
That applies to other things too, not just music.

Although not delightfully sonorous nor melodic necessarily, the sound
of the rumbling bolus born to the external world is close to F flat, as
in the opening and subtle chords of Das Rheingold, ( The first opera of
Richard Wagner's, Der Ring des Nibelungen ) and that is the sound
accompanying the relief and expulsion of a miniscule residue of the
kibble bit and billions of bacteria so severely denied the wetted
environment of the distal colon and RAN. Or to put it another way, the
convoluted and usually spiral accretion, not atypical, is neither
completely dry nor sloshily moist either.

You got it yet? I'm referencing the sound and sight of a healthy ferret
ridding himself of a well digested and near totally assimilated meal.

Perhaps you did not know, but the pooping ferret usually produces a
characteristic sound that you could listen were you to locate your
pinna adjacent (about15 to 20 millimeters) to his annus/nates.

Were it not that a few of my cages are elevated to the range of 5
to 6 feet, I would've otherwise missed the sonorous, albeit short
pseudo-flatulent gargles of the expelling sausages being born into the
world. As I mentioned above, the closest I can just now describe is
the sound of the opening melodic phrases of Wagner's Das Rheingold,
but with tiny undulations in the sound that seem to be a consequence
of the more bumpy surfaces of the bolus.

Were that the bolus completely smooth, the only undulations one is
likely to hear is the sphinctering and the threadlike terminis of the
proximal bolus, the last part to depart. As the finale is approached,
the sphincter squeezes ever and ever tighter to produce that
characteristic terminal string, and strangely enough, one can hear a
clearly but faintly and fading squeeking, which I can only describe as
the Valkyrie like cries, Ho-jo-to-ho.

And so we come to the end with the realization that both ends of the
ferret can and do produce sound. We easily hear the hiss and the scream
and the sharp bird-like chirp from the front, but most of us never hear
the melodious gurgles and oozings that emanate from the other end.

And it's this end from which we glean the finality of the digestive
process and the realization that in this finality there is not much
more than 1/670th ( 0.0014925 inch = 1.4925 X 10 to the 3rd power[SIC])
of that kibble particle that was briefly chewed and ground up into
chunks, formed a slurry with the saliva, and was swallowed, its sizing
being decremented both physically and biochemically as it traversed
Canalis Alementarium, the GI tract.

We most all realize by now that what courses through the GI tract is
essentially soup. And can we say in all honesty that providing good
warm soup in the very beginning is, in effect, jump starting the
digestive/assimilation process? I believe we most certainly can say
that.

And, in addition, we can say that the nutritive benefit of the
micro-miniaturized particle/solutes provides the ferret with increased
energy and food substances, some of which seem to enhance the growth
of fur, disintegrate and sink cataracts, prevent the development of
rat-tail, and, best of all, inhibit the development and growth of
cancer bodies associated with the adrenal glands.

So until we meet again, Auf Wiedersehen Frettchenvolk
( German:  See you again, ferret people.)

[Posted in FML 6289]