Q: "Can you please say something before [deleted] makes such a stink that
    I would rather [deleted] than read the FML?  You wrote the [deleted]
    thing!  SAY SOMETHING!"
 
A: Ok, I will: "Something."
 
The post in question was a discussion of the relative risks of various
ferret activities to compare them to the relative risk of eating bone.
It was not a discussion of injury or death.  I was specifically
discussing "the relative risks of eating bone," NOT "how many ferrets
die from various injuries."
 
There were (are) a couple of reasons I chose the approach; partly because
statistics can be easily misleading, causing some people to consider some
activities safer than they are, and make other activities seem dangerous
when such a consideration is unwarranted.  For example, I recall a single
auto accident in which a large number of ferrets died; ranking the
incident numerically would have skewed the results, whereas ranking the
incident on a relative scale was more representative of the actual risk
in comparison to other activities.  I wasn't trying to manipulate the
information to make a point, which would have been a very easy thing to
do, but I did want to present an honest, truthful appraisal of the
problem.  The easiest way to do that was to report incidents on a
relative scale.
 
The object was to give the benefit of the doubt to those who were
against ferrets eating bone.  This is a technique that I commonly use to
eliminate the chance a critic might bash my conclusions in cases where
data are "fuzzy"; it is hard to argue a conclusion when I've skewed the
evidence against myself.  You will recognize that I might say, "the
problem is insignificant if there are only a handful of cases in 3
million ferrets, but even if the population was 500,000 ferrets, the
problem would STILL be insignificant." By accepting questionable data
that worked against me, and discarding questionable data that worked for
me, you may not like my conclusions, but you will never be able to accuse
me of cheating by manipulating the data to win an argument.
 
After collecting the data, I recognized that while I could find people
who claimed their ferrets ate bone that harmed or killed them, no one
could actually prove bone injured or killed their ferrets.  I am not
implying these people were dishonest; I think they believed what they
were saying.  I remember one person told me their ferret died from blood
loss.  During the necropsy, the vet found holes in the stomach and what
looked like cuts on the lining of the duodenum, and suggested a sharp
bone cut or punctured the tissues, but did not find bone in the GI tract.
In another incident, someone whose ferret regularly consumed bone was
having problems, and an x-ray showed tiny bone fragments inside the
ferret's intestines.  A vet suggested bone was causing the problem, which
was seized upon by the person as a diagnosis.  In a third case, a shelter
that donates ferrets to my skeletal study sent me a ferret.  The ferret
had been necropsied, and the vet told the shelter people that the ferret
died from a piece of bone that had punctured the intestines.  I looked
and sure enough, there was a hole in the distal intestines, about 4
inches from the rectum, but no bone.  I continued looking and found more
holes, but no bone inside or outside the intestines.  I called the vet
and they admitted they never actually SAW bone in the hole, just assumed
it because the ferret consumed bone.  I also discovered the ferret died
in the morning and the necropsy was done in the evening, after the end of
the workday (about 10-12 hours).
 
The problem with these three incidents is that the first case was
probably gastric and duodenal ulcers.  In the second case, there was NO
connection between bone fragments and injury, and the vet making the
suggestion never examined the ferret.  The third case could have been
caused by anything: IBD, polyps, bacterial overgrowth, tissue
decomposition, but not bone because bone was not there.  I have copies
of confirmed reports of wild carnivores (non-domestic) that died from
bone, and on necropsy, the bone is ALWAYS there, exactly where it
punctured or blocked the esophagus or intestines (I know of no published
account of bone puncturing the stomach).  These incidents are like saying
an abandoned or lost ferret at a highway rest stop "proves" ferrets can
go feral.  There was NO link between cause and effect.  Nonetheless,
there were three clients and three vets who think the incidents were
true!  So, to be fair, I counted them, but how could I justify linking
the bone consumption to injury or death, when no link was ever
established?  I thought it would be unfair to penalize a potential
incident simply because the vets involved were guilty of trying
desperately to find a cause of death for a client who needed one for
the process of mourning.  Besides, even if the standards of scientific
evidence indicate the probability of these three events being, well,
improbable, the chance wasn't zero, so it would have been unfair to
discard them on that point alone.
 
This example illustrates the difficulty of taking an established,
documented account published in veterinary literature, and trying to give
it the same value as an anecdote reported years after the fact, based on
a few words from a vet trying to cushion the blow of death.  People hear
what they want to hear, they misunderstand, they forget details, they
confuse one incident with others, and dozens of other problems of memory,
which is why anecdotal stories are basically unreliable.  Again, using a
relative scale to rank incidents solved the dilemma of trying to assign
comparative worth to extremely good reports, and those, well, not nearly
as good.
[Posted in FML issue 4788]