Dear Sara:
 
>A friend who is not on the FML asked me to post this for her in hopes of
>getting some ideas.  She has two neutered male ferrets who play together
>very well.  There is however, one minor problem.  One of them likes to
>mount the other!  To me, this positively screams "adrenal" except that
>the aggressive ferret is only 9 months old.  Anything else that it might
>be?  Should she have general bloodwork and/or the U of Tenn panel done
>before considering surgery?
 
I think that 9 months is too young to be thinking of adrenal reight off the
bat.  In a ferret this young, dom,inance behavior should be considered.
Mounting in neutered animals is not always a sign of reproductive behavior,
but may be a sign of trying to establish dominance.  This one is so far
outside the mean age for the onset of adrenal disease, that the odds say
that it is something else.
 
Another possibility, and a surgical one at that would be cryptorchidism,
or a retained testicle.  In some large facilities, due to the number of
castrations done daily, and the fact that a cryptorchid is usually an
abdominal surgery, a ferret with only one descended testicle may slip
through.  Unfortunatately, there are no numbers on how often it happens.
But I have seen it (and had one of my own ferrets with the problem.
 
This is a tough problem to diagnose without abdominal surgery.  Rarely,
you can feel them in the inguinal canal beneath the skin - (sometimes thy
attempt to descend but don't make it all the way, and sometimes you end up
looking in the abdomen.)
 
With kindest regards,
Bruce Williams, DVM
[Posted in FML issue 3328]