This a comment of Judy Gronwold's post yesterday.  I am not picking on you
Judy or flaming you but you have brought up a lot of questions that I have
as well.
 
This post is not an attack at anyone but some facts and my opinions and
suspicions.  The guilty ones are probably the ones that are going to
holler the loudest though, if indeed there are any guilty ones.
 
FACTS first
Last summer a ferret in a shelter on the east coast died mysteriously.
Because of that and the symptoms it displayed it was tested for many things
including ADV and found to be ADV positive.  The shelter tested all the
shelter ferrets and found a ferret or ferrets that tested positive from one
breeder.  That ferret or ferrets were sent back to the breeder.  Being a
caring ferret person this shelter alerted many people in the ferret
community at the time.
 
OPINIONS and SUSPICIONS.
Then began a campaign to discredit or quiet this individual .  A smear
campaign was conducted.  That didn't work.  Banning was tried nor did
that work.  The individual did not quiet and the word was out.
 
Knowing how a breeding program among many hobby breeders is conducted such
as my hob will stud for your jill if I can have pick of the litter (and
there is nothing wrong with that as it helps spread good genes around to
further the entire breed) there are a lot of breeders with stock from
another breeder and therefore infected if any in the chain are infected.
There is a lot of ways to spread ADV but one sure one is the transmission
of the disease from jill to litter.  There was a lot of finger pointing and
dirt coming out over this and I imagine that there was a lot of testing
done during this period.  I think the thing that came out is that ADV is
a lot more widespread than people thought.  How can we hide or cover this
up.  There is only two ways to keep the disease from spreading, isolation
or culling (destroy the infected animals).  Normally isolation in a hobby
breeders area is not possible and most breeders don't want to just cull an
animal they love so now what.  So their breeding and showing days are over
until all the infected ferrets die of the disease which is unlikely or die
of something else.  What happens to the organizations that are made up to
show and further the breed as well as the majority of the membership is
made up of breeders, some of which can no longer show.  They die and a new
one replaces them.  Hey we come up wth a shelter just for ADV ferrets and
give all the ones we have to it and then we can breed and show again.  You
can't have a show if a some or most of the breeders are infected with a
contagious disease, so who else but the two ferret organizations on the
eastern US to form this shelter so they can get back to the business of
showing and breeding.  Now personally I think the shelter and the research
that goes with it is a good idea regardless of the political motivation
behind it.  If done correctly it will allow easy testing and possibly a
cure for ADV and therefore further the life a our beloved ferrets.
 
Dennis
The Terror Ten
[Posted in FML issue 2946]