>Some start off as a vet tech and become a vet through years of training >and experience. (Can anyone verify this for me?) [Umm... no. BIG] Definitely NO. I have known some vet techs who later went to vet school and put in all fo their years of hard study and got their doctorates to become vets, though. Maybe someone has known or heard of such individuals and didn't realize the route used. Our current vet used to be a vet tech; then he returned to school and worked his tail off. >to mention they preserve with BHA and BHT which is proven to >potetionally cause cancer Sorry, but this also is not correct. There were rodent studies in which exceedingly large amounts (imagine your ferrets eating bowls of nothing but these) caused some problems with specific forms of malignancies, but ironically there were reductions in some other forms of malignancies if memory serves (there are compounds which either can do either/or, or the studies just had abberations and aren't reliable and I think that at least one of these may have been among them). NO ONE has any hard data on this in either direction for ferrets. It's another case in which there are hypotheses in relation to ferrets. There is nothing wrong with folks personally favoring certain hypotheses and behaving accordingly when they aren't harmful ones, but it is important to not confuse any hypotheses (not been proven by well designed studies) as if they were fact, and it's wrong to panic about hypotheses. Honestly, it's just plain wrong to put much emotional energy into hypotheses because many don't pan out which causes confusion and because it risks skewing perceptions and therefore reducing open-mindedness needed for best assessment, so folks need to read, learn, choose, BUT also simply remember that any hypothesis may not pan out. I can understand how your confusion on this arose; it's one of a number of hypotheses that multiple people have way too often treated as if they were fact and that has needlessly created confusion and panic for many as a result. It is always good to look for actual proof: large enough numbers that indicate actual statistically different differences in disease rates, longevity or both, to look at the study design. For example: what species was used, what was the level of exposure, what was the nature of exposure, were there other variables that could explain what was seen, etc. It is always possible to have something sound good and yet not be valid. That isn't reason to not try something safe when you choose to, just reason to not treat it as if it were a fact while waiting for more info. Ashling and Scooter definitely have mottos: "Whatever Ashling wants, Ashling gets" "Kiss me, just a little bit longer..." I have too much of a headache to know the ones for the others right now >The reason their life expectancy is higher, is because of a man's theory. >his name was Charles Darwin...He stated the NATURAL SELECTION THEORY that >stated something about the (wild ferret) having predators, like eagles, >wolves, etc... Actually, what the Theory of Natural Selection says is that as the proportion of an allele (a genetic variant) in a population changes in response to pressures and to differences in reproduction rates the expression of that trait will be seen in smaller or larger numbers. (These factors tell of history, BTW, not of the future or even to a very large extent not of current factors.) >A statistical correlation just shows that there is a relationship, it >does not determine cause and effect. Yep. Exactly. Very often it is essential to know a missing piece of puzzle that has been left out, not known, ignored, etc. (For example, I have been surprised that no diet-controlled diabetics here stepped up with some info... I'm staying out of it myself and mostly waiting for hard data from studies for major changes, partly because we don't appear to personally have any major differences in health or longevity from those using a raw whole animal diet (exception being MC), so I don't know yet if there may be no difference in practise with other factors being more important or if we balance it out in some other way and could therefore possibly see some other improvements with changes (a possible thing that may be happening with MC), or if it's more of an either/or until a certain age at which point physiological limiting factors step in. Until there is hard data to each his or her own...) [Posted in FML issue 3945]