Louise was a silver-roan ferret that came into the shelter 18 months ago.
She was very thin, and was found in a school east of Melbourne, Vcitoria,
Australia. She was a very kind and loving jill, about 12 months old, and
was very close to a ferret that I had when I was young, whom we named her
after.
 
It was breeding season when she came to the shelter, and Louise didn't come
into season, so we figured that she was either pregnant, or already desexed,
we decided to wait and see.  If we had had her desexed when she came in we
may have noticed that something was wrong, but alas, being the only
Victorian ferret shelter, we had around 6 ferrets coming in a week which
were in season and needed desexing.
 
No matter how much we fed Louise, she never seemed to eat much or put on
any weight. We thought that she may be fretting and placed her in with some
of our friendly pet ferrets, she still did not put on any weight. We placed
her on a high nutrient paste called Nutrijel, and offered her a variety of
diets, but these also seemed to have little effect. She was always a very
active and happy ferret. She loved to war-dance and climbed up to the top
of the avery to play in the pipes with the other ferrets. She loved
attention and would leap onto us as soon as we opened the cage door. We
were just so busy with the continuos supply of ferrets coming into the
shelter we weren't really too concerned with the fact that Louise did not
want to eat much. We assumed that it was a physcological problem associated
with her being stressed when she was "out on the street."
 
Louise died a few weeks after she had come to us.
 
As with all of our shelter ferrets that die we had her post mortemed to see
what had gone wrong.  As the vet opened her abdomen we were all suprised.
Inside her abdome there was a bladder, 2 kindneys, 12 cm of colon, her
uterus and nothing else.  Louise had a diagphragmatic hernia.  A hole in the
"flap of skin" that separates the chest from the abdomen and is responsible
for maintaining a vacuum is the chest and enableing animals to breath.  This
was obviosly a chronic problem, Her liver, spleen, stomach, large and small
intestine where all crammed into her chest cavity.  This would have put an
enormous amount of pressure on her lungs and would have made breathing
extremely difficult- still she had no obvious signs of distress.  She was
not eating much because when her stomach was full it must have made her very
uncomfortable.  Feeding her a very high fat, high protien diet for a couple
of weeks would have increased her abdominal mass and inadvertantly killed
her.
 
Diagphragmatic hernias can be corected with surgery but are a very high risk
operation.  We see them fairly often in cats who are hit by cars in the
Aninal Hospital where I work.  Many cats don't survive and it is very fiddly
surgery in a cat and would have been a nightmare in a ferret.  To this time
I have seen only one other ferret with one.  Louise did not die in veign.
 
Recently we saw a female ferret with very similar symptoms and raced her to
the Hospital quickly.  We X-rayed her and found that her abdomen was very
empty looking.  During surgery we discovered that she did not actually have
a hernia, but her intestines (both large and small) where tucked up between
her liver and her diagphram.  We corrected this problem by pulling the
intestines down into the abdomen again and tacked them to the abdominal
wall.  The ferret recovered well and put on weight again quickly.  She was
adopted out to a friend and very active member of the society and is doing
great!!
 
We now keep a close eye on any ferret whose appetite is slim!!
 
Michael Curry
President- Ferret PAWS Inc. Victoria, Australia
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[Posted in FML issue 2336]