Your FML post on helping vets learn is BEAUTIFUL, Joanne!
 
Marilyn, the way that breeder treated you is terrible!  There are a
number of large farms out there and each has problems, some worse than
others and there's not a farm out there doing something questionable that
doesn't have some other large breeder also doing the same given thing.
Too often people forget that there are multiple ones.  BTW, for those
interested: you CAN arrange to see the results of recent USDA inspections
of large ferret breeders.  I forget quite how that is done -- it's been a
while -- but it WAS posted in the FML so if you search in the posts of
past years you will find how to do it.  The address for the FML archives
is in the header of every day's FML and the archives are marvelously
designed and easy to use.  (Those who want to go into "ancient" history
of the FML can use the SEND FERRET nnnn feature to get the lists that
predate those in the archives.  Just substitute the issue number for the
nnnn.  Info on how to use that feature is also in every day's FML.)
 
Dr. Sandra Kudrak and a team of vets and ferret organizations have
tackled the LONG process of improving USDA regulations for large
breeders/farms, animal distributors, and transport.  Creating changes in
the USDA takes along time (commonly years) and is a step-by-step process.
FML readers played an important part by emphasizing the need for such
improvements, and they are not alone.  To learn more about what has been
done so far while we wait for the next step affecting the public you can
read about work so far in http://www.ferretcongress.org
the site of the International Ferret Congress.  Those more fortunate
than I got to hear her and others speak in the recent IFC Symposium in
St. Louis.
 
John pointed out to me that there is a bio saying that there was
educational program the young Einstein did not get into -- back when
"electrical engineer" meant people working out problems like transmission
grids, not computing.  Thanks, John!  That actually isn't unusual.  It's
good that he found the right thing for himself, but with his degree of
passion for questioning I suspect that was inevitable.  One of the profs
I learned from later became a Mac Arthur Fellow.  He's a very hard
working soul who also did not get into everything he applied for when
young.  His choice to do his undergraduate work at Yale was partly due
to it being such a fine university and partly because it offered him a
scholarship when his state university did not.  His doctoral work was at
Harvard, and somewhere in there he took time off to work oil rigs to make
money to live on, being self-supporting.  There is also a person I met
through Steve whose personal focus was so narrow that he didn't thrive in
standard educational setting and also would have had trouble with exams
that looked at a person more broadly.  He partly starved back then to
donate time to physics programs (often fed and boarded by profs who
understood his passion) and eventually was noticed by a university and
got his doctorate in physics.  That particular person didn't have a high
school diploma or an undergraduate degree.  Such individuals are rare,
but they exist against great odds.
[Posted in FML issue 4870]