I didn't mean to open a can of worms! I certainly could have expressed myself better. Please chalk it up to exhaustion and many distractions. I never meant to imply that all early adrenal cases are from neglectful homes--just that, because ferrets from neglectful homes have a higher incidence of adrenal disease, there must be some risk factor that exists more often in neglect cases. If we can figure out which factors increase the risk of adrenal disease, maybe we can reduce the risk. Obviously, some ferrets are predisposed to it for one reason or another. I strongly believe that there are likely to be many causes. There's no single cause of heart disease or lung cancer or breast cancer, three of the deadliest diseases that affect humans. But we can identify things that increase our risk of getting it. I'm sorry if I did offend anyone. It was absolutely not my intent--but I didn't express myself at all well. I feel very strongly for anyone who has had a young ferret with adrenal disease--it's shocking and unexpected. Our own adrenal case was 7 and that was hard enough to deal with. I was just thinking out loud in my last post. As for the whole food mess: do I think diet has anything to do with the incidence of adrenal disease? Probably. Feed a kid nothing but french fries for 10 years and see how many diseases he gets. Obviously, a higher-quality diet leads to a lower likelihood of disease overall. What's a high-quality diet, in ferret terms? *I don't claim to know.* Some things are not good for ferrets, we all know that, but what constitutes a "good" food, as in a balanced diet, is still pretty much unknown territory. I have a sneaking suspicion that the ideal ferret diet would probably consist mainly of mice, with the occasional rabbit or chicken tossed in, and an egg with shell every now and then. Gee, sounds like Bob C's gravy, multi-species version... :-) My ferrets, however, eat kibble. What I consider "good" kibble, meaning I'm comfortable with the ingredient list. They get chicken puree now and then, but essentially they eat kibble. I don't really want to get into the food debate; I just do believe that poor diet is a risk factor for adrenal disease. It could very well be a minor one. For all we know, lack of exercise could be the problem a lot of ferrets have, or not enough natural light, or unclean drinking water over long periods of time leading to various chemical imbalances.... or a million other things. Or none of them. Just as some people will develop tumors no matter what, some ferrets seem to be predisposed to adrenal disease. I did not intend to lay the blame on any of the owners around here. I have seen ferrets from neglectful homes, but unless I've personally seen how you care for your ferrets and it's awful, I don't consider you neglectful. If you care enough to be here on the FML, I'll give you the benefit of the doubt. :-) I definitely agree that we need more research... but who's doing it? The first part of researching something is coming up with hypotheses to test--otherwise you don't know what data to gather. And coming up with hypotheses is, essentially, thinking out loud. :-) Jen and the Crazy Business http://home.maine.rr.com/tesseract [Posted in FML issue 3100]