For the person who asked if Totally Ferret is a good food, I'd like to
offer my wholehearted recommendation.  It is an EXCELLENT food.  Totally
Ferret also has a great record of offering lots of free donations of food
to ferret shelters - many of the shelters in New England have benefited
from their generosity.  So when you buy Totally Ferret, you're not only
buying a top-notch food for your ferret, you're supporting a company that
makes an effort to lend a helping hand to ferret shelters who are
struggling with the cost of helping abandoned fuzzies.
 
Totally Ferret contains chicken as the main ingredient, as opposed to
8-in-1 (which ferrets love for the raisin-ey taste but has too much corn
and fiber for my liking) and I've seen a couple of ferret foods on the
shelves that are so full of dried fruits and little colorful corn puffs
that they look like kids' breakfast cereals!!  Marshall Farms diet has the
recommended amount of protein for a ferret, but the protein comes from
fish.  Aside from fish not being part of a ferret's "natural diet" (which
would consist of small rodents and birds, not salmon), the fishy oils
give the ferret an overall slightly "fishy" odor that many owners find
objectionable.  Not just the poops - their glands start giving off a fishy
smell too.  Ferrets do tend to like Marshalls, and it breaks down easier
for duck soup because it's crumbly, but ferrets should actually have a
crunchier food than that anyway.  Like dogs and cats, ferrets need to
crunch on dry food to maintain tooth and gum health (in the wild they'd
be crunching on bones and this would suffice, unfortunately our domestic
babies need our common sense to fill in!).
 
If you can't get TF in your area, it's available online in a lot of
places.  Now that my ferrets are over the age of 4, I offer them both a
bowl of regular TF and a bowl of the TF for older ferrets (green bag).
They seem to prefer both equally, and I like to give them a little variety
without upsetting their stomachs!
 
-Heather
 Massachusetts
[Posted in FML issue 3623]