Kim wrote: >Look at it this way, if it were your child, your mother or whomever you >care about most in the whole wide world - wouldn't you get them medical >care immediately? BRAVO! If something is serious, if there are symptoms which would lead you to get care if you suffered from them (or care for your human loved one), if a ferret can't breath well, is bleeding, is limping, in convulsing, etc. CALL YOUR VET AND GET AN EMERGENCY APPOINTMENT to treat or fix the problem! Way too many ferret die absolutely NEEDLESSLY! These are living beings, not ornamental features, and they need and deserve your help and love. (Sorry, have just run into too many like that again recently and they are so horribly painful to read due to the how so many of such deaths would have been totally avoidable with proper care.) Swollen vulva and fur loss: Think sexual heat (which can be dangerous due to complications like potentially fatal anemia), incomplete spay, or adrenal neoplasia (depending on ferret and if a spay was done or partly done, and age). Time for a vet appointment no matter which of the three it is! For help with ferret health info on a *non-emergency* basis: http://www.smartgroups.com/groups/ferrethealth http://geocities.com/sukieslist (which I need to update) Honestly, there are halfway approaches, but your child's allergies were already bad enough to give up earlier ferrets. The only way to be most fair to the children and to the ferrets is to wait for the child to out-grow the allergy (which might happen during the teens), or to move out, or for approaches to allergies to improve enough. Three times ferrets have been with you and then had to be elsewhere. It's a situation which calls for patience and putting your personal desires aside for a long time, I am afraid, but that is part of life, especially part of adult life. [Posted in FML issue 3834]