Mother nature makes mistakes, but she also erases most of them. We domesticated the ferret, but still Mother Nature can make mistakes, problem is we do not give her the chance to rectify her mistakes. If ferrets were wild animals and a ferret was born with a genetic fault, lets say a white stripe on his head. He would leave the nest when old enough and would mate with a ferret from another nest; the gene would then be filtered out. If he was born with a stripe on the head and was deaf he would not live long enough to reproduce. Thus the faulty gene is erased. But we second had players of nature seem to want to reproduce this mistake and don't think of the consequences to the animal. This is a mistake of mother nature, she doesn't make them often, so to strengthen the mistake more often than not it is necessary to breed siblings to strengthen the faulty gene. But if this faulty gene is also attached to a secondary or unseen mistake, then we also strengthen this unseen gene. Simple proof that the genes are connected, a breeder in Holland breed two different lines of blaze, neither line had any deafness in their history, but breeding these two ferrets did produced deaf ferrets. If you should happen to discover that, lets say, the silver mitts had a higher percentage of heart problems, you could probably connect it to the color breeding. That is not too say they all have heart problems, but that the initial breeding ferrets of the color silver mitt had a heart problem and because of inbreeding for the color, you have unknowingly also strengthened the heart problems. So if we just loved the strange colors when and if they come allong and let Mother Nature do her work, then I'm sure we would see a lot less problems in ferrets. Ferrets in Holland are not neutered until at least six months for a male and only when they come into season for a female. We do get a lot of Adrenal and insulinoma in Holland, but we seldom see it before a ferret has reached the age of five or six years old. We also advise people to try to give their ferrets a more natural light/dark cycle. And once again breeding and hereditary factors, I'm sure do play a roll. Melody, if your ferret has insulinoma I presume he is being fed extra soft meals, try making just the amount you know he will eat and mix the medication in it, one of my ferrets get a very bitter medicine for her heart, I give her duck soup twice a day and she doesn't even seem to notice that the medicine is in it. Stephenie SDF [Posted in FML issue 4668]