>From:    Shelley Knudsen <[log in to unmask]>
>Subject: Heat cycles vs. Aplastic anemia
>I recently received an e-mail from a person who said their female ferret
>had gone into heat five times in the last few years, and yet was still
>doing fine.  She wanted to know if I could explain this, since everything
>she read and her vet told her that female ferrets will die if they go
>into heat.
 
Um... If she knows that it is a bad thing, why is the female not spayed?
 
But to answer the question, it is not a 100% thing.  The Fox book, Biology
and "Diseases of the Ferret" references testing done that showed that 50%
of the females died.  It didn't state whether any of those same females
would have died with a second year of non-breeding.
 
But 50% odds of death are really really bad.  Flip and coin and if its
heads you die.  Do you want to gamble on that when simply spaying the
jill completely removes that coin flip?  As well as preventing uterine
infections which are particularly nasty and harder to treat.
 
We admit using scare tactics to get people to spay their jills.  We sort of
wash over the "only" 50% bit as we really want to encourage the behavior.
If asked we would of course tell the truth about the odds and use that coin
toss analogy.
 
>For those of you in countries other than the USA, do you regularly spay
>your female ferrets, and if not, does it affect them adversely at all to
>go through heat cycles if they are not bred?
 
From what we can tell anecdotally there may be more of a problem with
American ferrets than those in at least some other countries.  This is
based on stories from particularly "old school" UK breeders and seeing
our own "immigrant" jills pop right on out of season before we breed them.
 
bill and diane killian
zen and the art of ferrets
[Posted in FML issue 3217]