>Dear God, I am sickened!  How could anyone take newborn mice, murdered
>by inhuman animals (human type) and feed them to our sweet babies?  Or
>almost as bad, live mice.  Can you imagine the terror that poor creature
>feels.  There are plenty of meat substitutes out there.We don't have
>to promote animal cruelty by feeding our babies other babies.  Stop the
>cruelty now.
 
First I d like to say that I agree that feeding live animals to ferrets
is cruel and totally unnecessary.  Any prey that you offer your ferret
should be humanely put to death before giving it to the ferret.
 
Ferrets are predators and obligate carnivores.  For their survival they
need to eat the meat of other animals whether it be in the form of
natural prey or meat based commercial diets.  As humans and omnivores,
we can choose to exclude meat from our diet for ethical and/or health
reasons, but ferrets don t have that choice.
 
If it s OK to feed commercial diets made up by processed parts of killed
animals from the meat industry, why is it an ethical problem to feed raw
chicken from the grocery store which is in fact just another dead animal
from the same meat industry.
 
Mice is the staple diet of wild polecats in many places in the world, and
a full grown mouse is the perfect, nutritionally balanced meal containing
everything a ferret needs.  Is it more ethically inappropriate to feed
your ferret mice than chicken or other types of meat?
 
It s up to each and everyone to decide the most ethical source for
obtaining food.  An alternative to the commercial diets and large scale
meat industry can be high standard private breeders where the animals
are healthy, well kept and well treated.
 
Is it right to kill animals to feed other animals?  If not, perhaps the
ethical dilemma is keeping predators in captivity and thereby assuming
the responsibility of providing them with biologically appropriate food,
i.e. animal protein.  In other words, if you keep ferrets as pets you
will also have to accept their need to eat meat.
 
Marie
[Posted in FML issue 3937]