Longevity: not there is something I've followed.  The oldest one I could
ever find with substantiation was 14 years old at death.  The older ones
turned out to not be real when checked.  I've heard of one claimed to be
19 who was 5  (The confusion was because the third party who mentioned it
heard the permit was gotten 19 years ago and thought that meant the
specific ferret was.)  I've run into a number of cases where people were
pulling the legs of others.  There were some cases of breeders who were
out and out lying to bring in more money.  The usual situation, though,
was completely innocent.  There were a lot of cases where people thought
that a ferret was years older than it was.  These ferrets typically were
very old: usually 9 or 10 years but the people tended to think they were
older (usually saying "15" for some reason) till they checked records.
I got a lot of "Oh, I'm sorry, but..." replies when I asked people to
check their paper records.  I DID find a few lines that were claimed to
be typically unusually old at death.  Some of those claims were false.
Two were accurate but one of the breeders had stopped and the line was
gone.  The second was still following the line and I haven't heard
anything since so I have no idea what happened.  At the time that we
lost contact they were getting 10 or 11 years normally in that line (not
just sporadic individuals).
 
The very, very, very old occur everywhere under a wide range of living
conditions and as you can tell lines weren't involved.
 
There are those who study extreme old age in humans and a widely accepted
conclusion as of last year or the one before was that some individuals
just happen to have won the genetic jackpot and it doesn't matter what
they do pretty much -- they are going to live long anyway.  (This is like
the French Woman who died a few years back at something like 126 years,
and another very old one in the U.S.  They were pretty well bullet proof,
so they could eat loads of fats, junk food, smoke like chimneys and
behave in ways which kill too many other people way too early (50s and
before). )  It is NOT the junk food nor the smoking (or in ferrets
skipping the vaccines) which keeps the extremely old alive so long; it
is just being lucky with the combination of genetics they got at birth.
 
It makes sense when looking into something to go with the advice of those
who have studied it the most and with the best data.  For health that
means veterinarians.
[Posted in FML issue 4298]