Jerri, Wow! $100 per ferret! Is that problem only in your county in KY? In NJ we have a state fee and it is around $10 or $15 a year now per household. (I'd have to look it up because I paid it about 6 months ago.) There was a city which tried to impose conflicting laws on top of those which backed down when the state got interested in what they were doing years ago. Breeders and shelters have different permits than the rest of us. Yes, do talk with your state (not national) senator from your area as a starting point and widen out from there, also with your state's dept. in charge of such things. Alicia has been involved with changing a number of rules, regs, and legislation pieces. Will you be going to the Symposium in Atlanta in October? She'll be teaching a lot about that there. New York State is fine for ferrets, James. The problem area is New York CITY. "Ferrapy"? "Ferrapy", James? I LOVE that. I think that is a word that should stick and be used over and over again. I can't recall ever hearing anyone say that before but it is so logical and good! Loving ferrapy; hug a ferret today and heal. The difficulty with advancing ferret medicine often boils down to funding. Several other families that I know of (and I am sure also some I don't) and our's give a decent chunk of money to that each year. Steve and I have been having to pinch pennies since the labs went away with he and some others starting business and we often feel guilty that we simply can't do that anymore, especially at the level that we did in the past. Said plainly, there just aren't as many donations made as are needed for such work; there seem to be most a few who are shouldering this so whenever a large donor has to stop the impact is great; a LOT more smaller donors are sorely needed. We made our donations to such efforts through a number of places: the Morris Animal Foundation (usually in the 5 figures so we feel especially bad about having to stop that), the AMC, MIT Dept of Comparative Med, UGA vet school, the AFIP, Charles Weiss's clinic (during the development of some of the surgical adrenal approaches), the AFA, etc. It would really help if a lot more people gave, even if they can't give a lot. We're no money bags; we live in a small condo and really need to replace the carpet, bathtub, etc. but can't fit those into the budget right now, but we do believe in some things so strongly that they come first: medical care for the ferrets, helping advance such knowledge, and creating rainy day savings (which we are able to use now) and retirement savings whenever possible... Those just are our particular priorities. I suspect that one thing that perhaps could improve the teaching of ferrets in vet schools would be the vet students themselves pushing to have them more included since they are sure to have to treat them. The least that such programs could do would be to use the videos of Doctors Debbie Kemmerer and Charles Weiss and at least one of the existing ferret veterinary texts to provide at least the basics and to let the students know that there ARE resources out there. I tend to think that there are enough ferrets out there that there is no reason that the basics have to so often wait for someone to later do a specialization in exotics or to otherwise learn after graduation. [Posted in FML issue 4134]