S. sent me a private message that knowledge is power. She's right. Now she is learning about blockages from what we went through, but we might not have known fast enough if we hadn't read and learned from earlier posts by others. BTW, Ashling had NOTHING show up on her x-rays but she got to within an hour of having the make the choice about surgery; x-rays can show when the situation is very bad sometimes calling for rapid surgery, I gather, but they aren't an elimination factor for surgery in general. We were told to jump IMMEDIATELY if she began any projectile vomiting; have heard from a dear friend, D., with very long ferret experience that he and his family had one who died within only a few hours of starting projectile vomiting -- before surgery could be done. (The vet was busy already with another emergency.) In light of what Ashling went through I sure can agree with that shelter person who won't adopt out to people who let their ferrets have unsupervised play with things even more likely to cause blockages, like latex or rubber. Cloth that finally digests was bad enough and almost required major surgery; imagine if it had been one of those substances. Then death would have been so much more likely. I recall the early days of ferret discussion on the Internet and how very many died so rapidly then from those things; it's great to build a knowledge base so that foolish mistakes can be avoided. [Posted in FML issue 3175]