Hey, Ela, you folks have been working hard at this for a whole year more than you remembered! LOL! It was mid 1996! WOW! SOS will have it's tenth anniversary in just 2 years! Talk about a lot of good work! >Judith emailed us back and said it was just the three of us, and she >was open to suggestions. So, we talked and deliberated, and decided we >needed some more "consultants" to help us figure out how to run this >thing. So, we enlisted the help of BIG, Alicia, Sukie, and some others >to formulate guidelines for running S.O.S. I'd forgotten, too, how much Totally Ferret and the Ferret Store did to help get SOS up and running early on with so much help for shelters. I apologize for forgetting so much! I have TOTALLY forgotten that! I think I am going senile since I have forgotten so very, vary much! ;-) Robert I sure hope that you first read up on genetics problems in ferrets and on problems associated with mating, pregnancy, nursing, infancy, the illnesses and tumors which are specific to whole ferrets, behavioral differences in caring for whole ferrets such as when to separate, and the genetic lines to NOT mate such as those with certain neural crest genetics, those with strongly non-bilateral coloration, those with spotting, some with color depletion, those with strongly non-lateral head coloration, lines with cataracts, lines with deafness, lines with genetically shortened tails, etc. If not, there is some info for you in http://fhl.sonic-weasel.org (The FHL could use more posts on the breeding health subsets, though) in Ferret-Genetics in Yahoogroups in the Zen Ferret site if memory serves and I am sure elsewhere (and would like to know where for academic reasons). To say thank you to Late Night with Conan O'Brien: [log in to unmask] To say thank you to the Today Show: [log in to unmask] [Posted in FML issue 4397]