All,
 
I'm probably going to regret jumping into this but here goes.
 
My wife and I have a small shelter in NH.  So far, as far as we know, we have
not had ECE in any of the animals in the shelter.  We now isolate all ferrets
coming in for 14 days.  I know that is not a guarantee, since there may be
"carriers" that do not exhibit the symptoms but can pass it on.  We have just
isolated the entire shelter for 21 days after being told that two of our
adoptees developed a brown diarrhea after leaving here (probably stress and
food/water change, but we didn't want to take a chance.) No diarhea in any of
the 30 here over that entire time so I guess we're clear.
 
Point is that shelters depend on people adopting ferrets.  I'd say well over
half of those adopting are those getting another companion for their ferrets.
As it is, in most shelters the in-flow of ferrets just about equals t the
number of adoptions.  Imagine what would happen to those shelters if say they
only adopted out half of those that came in.  (We handle about 100 ferrets a
year here, and have facilities to care and house about 40 ferrets at any one
time.)  Inside of 6 months, we'd have to shut our doors to incoming ferrets
for lack of space.  Most other shelters would last about that long too before
they began shutting their doors.  What would happen to the ferrets that were
homeless or were no longer wanted?  Left loose?  given to Humane Societies
that would kill them?
 
What are shelters to do?  Are they to become the "Land fills" of the animal
world and just be allowed to fill, then close them up and locate a new one?
How can a shelter protect its animals and "guarantee" that it is always ECE
free?
 
We love ferrets.  We would never knowingly place any ferret in danger.  But
how would we know that one of the ferrets that we got in last month was a
carrier of ECE?  Place it with all of ours and see if they came down with it?
What if all of ours had ECE as kits and we didn't notice it and now they
were carriers too?
 
Please don't get me wrong.  If I knew the answers I wouldn't be working for
a living anymore.  I know there are no answers, or at least no easy answers.
Ignoring ECE won't make it go away.  Not adopting from shelters WILL make
shelters go away.  If I were a ferret owner, I'd probably think twice about
adopting from a shelter now.
 
Is there anyway to save the shelter system?  Anyone?
 
Dick Bossart
[Posted in FML issue 1244]