>After the ferrets in the shelters are adopted and the way of getting a >ferret is more costly, longer and more stressful on our little friends >(from a shipment with other ferrets to alone and by ups) Do you even know the route by which ferrets get to the pet store?? They're shipped and trucked in by the crateful, and in our area pet stores have had ferrets packed so tightly in the crates that they fight each other out of fear and hunger. Small-scale breeders ship single ferrets all the time. Shipping to one destination (as opposed to pet store ferrets who are shipped to a distributor then held there, then sometimes mixed in with MORE ferrets, some are shipped to a secondary distributor, then to the pet store) by UPS would be a huge improvement. I realize you are enthusiastic and want to educate, but you need to learn a lot more about this before you make these kinds of statements or recommendations. The trip from the mill to the pet store is a much longer, scarier, and perilous journey than the trip for one ferret to be shipped directly to its new address. Research a little more about the way ferrets get from the big-scale breeders to the pet stores. You may be surprised (and dismayed) by what you learn. Many ferret experts and vets believe that cross-contamination of diseases like ECE happened in transit when the baby ferrets from different breeders were packed in together and handled improperly by the distributors. Many pet-store babies have been found to be carriers of ECE that they picked up in shipment from other ferrets, not from the breeder where they originated. It's entirely possible that ADV is going to turn out to have spread this way as well. Ferrets shipped directly to a new owner from a small-scale, responsible breeder do not carry this same risk. There are always risks shipping live animals, but the reasons you state are not good reasons to encourage the purchase of pet-store babies. [Posted in FML issue 3763]