>I was also wondering if anybody had any good suggestion on how to >keep food the freshest possible without having to bite into a piece >of kibble to make sure it isn't stale. Freeze it! Like you, I feed a mix of four or five different foods at a time, so I buy 10lb bags or larger (it's cheaper that way) and freeze it until I need it. The idea isn't mine - I got it from an old, old FML nutrition series from Bob C - I believe it's one of the highlighted docs on the FML archive page. Anyway, what I do is divide the food up into half-kilo Ziploc bags and throw them in the freezer. Then, I take out just what I need and mix it in a large Rubbermaid food storage container. That way I only have a week or two of fresh food out at a time. Since kibble contains very little water and has a high surface area to mass ratio (in other words, it's in tiny pieces) it doesn't freeze "hard", it doesn't clump, and it "thaws" in a couple of minutes. Sometimes my ferrets even like to steal a cool "kibble-sicle" right after I take the food out of the freezer! Ferret food CAN go rancid if left out - it has lots of fats in it. At least the good foods do. ------------------- Bob is right - digital scales are the only way to go. Very few mechanical scales have the accuracy OR precision to weigh 2lb ferrets. I bought one mechanical animal scale from Drs. Fosters and Smith....it was C-R-A-P - junk. Please don't waste your money on one of those. Your best bet is to get good digital kitchen scale, many of which can be had for under $30 US. Most will have a tare function (VERY useful), and can be switched to read metric or English weights. Most will handle up to 4-5 pounds, which is more than enough for most pet ferrets. There are two minor drawbacks to a kitchen scale, though. First, most have a tiny platform, so unless your ferret is trained to stand in place on his back legs for a couple of minutes, you will have a hard time fitting him on there. I solve this by placing a bowl on the platform, zeroing the weight (with the handy tare function), and placing the ferret in the bowl. A plastic or stainless bowl works best - glass is too heavy for the scale. A tall, deep bowl works better than a shallow, broad bowl as well, since a ferret WILL try to climb out of the broad bowl and will end up tipping the whole thing over. The other problem is that most food ingredients don't tend to move much on their own - at least not once they get to us - so most kitchen scales don't have the "weight lock" or "average" function that you will find on veterinary scales. That means that the ferret's weight will seem to jump around a bit as you weigh him, so you will have to somewhat estimate the correct weight. This effect is more pronounced if you weigh in grams instead of ounces. Unfortunately good veterinary scales seem to start around $300. If you're willing to part with that much though, they're well worth it and far more precise than any kitchen scale. Just ask your vet to purchase one for you through their suppliers. (I haven't found ANY good small animal scales available on the consumer market.) I personally weigh even my healthy ferrets once a month, and I know of others who do the same once a week. Even with a healthy ferret, doing so helps you spot health trends before they become crises. ------------------- >I did not know that Marshall's did such a thing as guarantee cards. >I got something like a birth certificate with some adoptees, but the >two I bought from a store did not have such papers. I would attack This seems to be extremely common. From what I have seen, many of the distribution centers (often run by the store chains themselves) don't even bother to send the cards on the stores. It's a deplorable practice as far as I'm concerned. We don't have a single guarantee card/birth certificate for ANY of our ten Marshall's ferrets - five bought and five adopted. I think many of these stores will take the ferrets back themselves, but we don't want to return our babies like some defective "goods", we just want help with the medical bills! roger missing bear, lancelot and kodi [Posted in FML issue 4402]