Jerri, Wow!  $100 per ferret!  Is that problem only in your county in KY?
In NJ we have a state fee and it is around $10 or $15 a year now per
household.  (I'd have to look it up because I paid it about 6 months
ago.)  There was a city which tried to impose conflicting laws on top of
those which backed down when the state got interested in what they were
doing years ago.  Breeders and shelters have different permits than the
rest of us.
 
Yes, do talk with your state (not national) senator from your area as a
starting point and widen out from there, also with your state's dept. in
charge of such things.
 
Alicia has been involved with changing a number of rules, regs, and
legislation pieces.  Will you be going to the Symposium in Atlanta in
October?  She'll be teaching a lot about that there.
 
New York State is fine for ferrets, James.  The problem area is New York
CITY.
 
"Ferrapy"?  "Ferrapy", James?  I LOVE that.  I think that is a word that
should stick and be used over and over again.  I can't recall ever
hearing anyone say that before but it is so logical and good!  Loving
ferrapy; hug a ferret today and heal.
 
The difficulty with advancing ferret medicine often boils down to
funding.  Several other families that I know of (and I am sure also some
I don't) and our's give a decent chunk of money to that each year.  Steve
and I have been having to pinch pennies since the labs went away with he
and some others starting business and we often feel guilty that we simply
can't do that anymore, especially at the level that we did in the past.
Said plainly, there just aren't as many donations made as are needed
for such work; there seem to be most a few who are shouldering this so
whenever a large donor has to stop the impact is great; a LOT more
smaller donors are sorely needed.  We made our donations to such efforts
through a number of places: the Morris Animal Foundation (usually in the
5 figures so we feel especially bad about having to stop that), the AMC,
MIT Dept of Comparative Med, UGA vet school, the AFIP, Charles Weiss's
clinic (during the development of some of the surgical adrenal
approaches), the AFA, etc.  It would really help if a lot more people
gave, even if they can't give a lot.  We're no money bags; we live in a
small condo and really need to replace the carpet, bathtub, etc. but
can't fit those into the budget right now, but we do believe in some
things so strongly that they come first: medical care for the ferrets,
helping advance such knowledge, and creating rainy day savings (which we
are able to use now) and retirement savings whenever possible... Those
just are our particular priorities.
 
I suspect that one thing that perhaps could improve the teaching of
ferrets in vet schools would be the vet students themselves pushing to
have them more included since they are sure to have to treat them.
 
The least that such programs could do would be to use the videos of
Doctors Debbie Kemmerer and Charles Weiss and at least one of the
existing ferret veterinary texts to provide at least the basics and to
let the students know that there ARE resources out there.  I tend to
think that there are enough ferrets out there that there is no reason
that the basics have to so often wait for someone to later do a
specialization in exotics or to otherwise learn after graduation.
[Posted in FML issue 4134]