I had a family emergency and have been offline for a few days. Let's just say one silly son, plus one off-road bicycle, plus one 15 ft cliff equals a single red-faced offspring peering over a pinned and casted leg. Darwin wrote about offspring like this, or he would have had he known about riding offroad bikes in the vicinity of limestone cliffs. The boy must have angels hovering over him. Regarding tooth brushing in wild polecats; I'm not sure, but I doubt if it is a regular practice, at least not in the way that the lovely, red-haired Mary describes. I think the only brushing a polecat does is fluffing up that tail into a bottle-brush from time to time. ;-) Excluding garbage-eating wild animals, such as bears and raccoons, wild carnivores RARELY have problems with tartar (dental calculus) or decay (caries). I can honestly say that in the thousands of carnivore skulls I have studied, tartar and decay are so minor that they are considered statistically insignificant. Broken or damaged teeth are fairly common, especially in the larger carnivores, but for the most part, teeth remain clean, and while they may have significant wear facets, they generally last the lifetime of the animal with little problem. Our immediate problem relates to diet. Modern dried ferret diets use highly processed carbohydrates as a binding agent (between 35%-70% depending on the source) which translates nutritionally as feeding ferrets meat powder mixed in a significant amount of sugar. These caloric nuggets are touted to "clean" teeth, but in carnivores that statement is extremely misleading (and probably false advertizing!). If they cleaned tartar from teeth, then WHY do cats, dogs, and ferrets require protracted dental care? Why do they suffer tartar buildup, bad breath, receeding gums, and, ultimately, systemic infections? Obviously, the ability of hard kibble to clean teeth is overrated. When a kibble is consumed, tiny fragments (some microscopic) of the sugar-rich food remain in the mouth, turn into a pasty white substance, and coats the surfaces of the mouth and teeth (food dishes fill up with these tiny fragments, as many people have observed). This provides both a home and a food source for bacteria. The process is helped by short- and long-term pH changes in the mouth (oral pH is significantly different in animals eating a meat diet compared to those eating a carbohydrate-rich kibble). It takes a short time for the bacteria-laden white substance to calcify into the building blocks of dental calculus. The bacterial love the scratches put on teeth by the hardened structure of the kibble (dental attrition). My ferrets regularly eat whole mouse and rat carcasses (I buy them as frozen feeders; my heart is too soft to kill them myself), which have natural substances that clean teeth of tartar and white substance (fur, sinew, bone), while at the same time helping to build an oral pH that reduces bacterial growth. As a result, my ferrets have minor or no tartar buildup. Admittedly, my ferrets mostly eat chicken, rabbit, duck, turkey, and the like, and only eat a small amount of kibble, so my problem is minimal (Yes, I feed kibble. You never known when you have to have someone babysit the brood, and I usually have them fed kibble at that time). For ferrets eating kibble, the ONLY way to keep the teeth clean is by regular tooth brushing and instrument cleaning. Bob C [Posted in FML issue 4113]