The best soup additives are actually the cheapest & easiest. Liquid vitamins from your vet, and an egg yolk. The egg yolk provides extra protein (which is especially good for insulinoma kids). To a one-pint jar of soup (my shelter's one day supply for the fuzzies that require daily medications... and a couple that simply require twice daily soup to survive, LOL), I add one egg yolk (NOT the white!) and one teaspoon of Pet Tinic (liquid vitamins... your vet may have another brand that's as good or better). My soup base is simply their dry food (a high quality ferret food) mixed with water. I make up a mush of dry kibble & water once a week of two cups of kibble soaked in water, with more water added & blended till it's the consistency of thick cake batter. I store that in the fridge and scoop out 1/2 cup of mush a day into a Mason jar, add an egg yolk, the vitamins, and water to fill the jar. Stir it up and microwave it for 2 minutes (or enough to cook the egg yolk). Ladle it into individual bowls and add whatever meds or additives (as in vet recommended stuff an individual ferret might need). You may have to adjust the amount for your number of ferrets... My quantity is for six ferrets twice a day with a few extras that get a bowl if they're awake and happen to notice it's soup time. I make the actual soup daily since I don't like to keep anything with barely cooked egg yolk for very long, even though I've been told that it should keep for a couple of days easily. And it needs to be stirred and warmed up anyway so there's not much difference time and labor-wise. For sick fuzzies eating ONLY soup, use less water, and feed every four hours. Same recipe... simple. And no problems with getting them back to eating their dry food because they like the taste of their soup better. To get your fuzzies to accept a different tasting soup, you may have to offer it to them and let them lick it from your fingers for several days or even a week, but they'll most always eventually decide that it's ok to eat and will make the change. Don't give up on a flavor change just because they turn those fuzzy snoots up the first few times. Ferrets (weaned) don't need milk. They need the protein & vitamins in the milk, not the lactose... anything ending in "ose" you can pretty much read as "sugar". (That's a generalization, for those of us without the education or time to do a chemical breakdown.) We all love our fuzzies and want to give them the very best... but the easier you can make that "very best" (whatever recipe it is) fit into your particular lifestyle, the better the chances are that you can KEEP DOING it consistently for the life of your fuzzy babies. This doesn't mean that every other recipe is bad for your ferret. This only means that THIS one is safe and sufficient in almost every case for almost every ferret and it's QUICK and EASY. Debi Christy Ferrets First Foster Home [Posted in FML issue 3160]