Thank you all for the responses. I have had a few emails asking for
the signs of what we saw. Basically, she arched her head backward and
wouldn't straighten it out, the hour before she died. I was making a
vet appointment for her to be put to sleep but she passed before we
could get in that afternoon. The vet called it "stargazing".

From everything I have read - this is not usually something to worry
about in ferrets, only in the worst of cases and apparently these cases
don't have a very good prognosis anyway. I think the organs already
have to be damaged - the body has already started to eat away at the
organs for nourishment, for this electrolyte imbalance to occur (from
what I have read, I am not a vet and I am not sure on this at all).
There is not a lot out there, but it just shocked me to hear in the
news article about the starved cat - for her to put it so succinctly -
they said that cat they found was one day or less away from death and
so they were feeding him restricted amounts of food for the time being.
The ferret that passed on that I am talking about was so bad the vet
had a hard time even finding a heartbeat and we could barely see her
breathing most of the time. But, she wanted to eat.

Thank you all for your kind emails and protocols on starved ferrets and
your wonderful stories of ferrets brought back from the brink. She was
the only ferret that we ever lost that had been starved and I guess it
still hurts.

L

[Posted in FML 6988]