Dog food in general has too little protein, too little fat, too much starch, and no added taurine -- among other differences from ferret food -- making it very unsuitable and even dangerous as a primary diet for ferrets. If you can't get ferret food then a high quality kitten food is a better kibble choice. Yvonne, are you sure this is diabetes and not insulinoma? Your description of what you do does not sound like diabetes. If diabetes, what insulin type are you using? Also, if so then has Lupron been tried? That may sounds strange but it helps some ferrets with diabetes, and Dr. Jerry Murray explains why in a past post in http://fhl.sonic-weasel.org which has multiple diabetes posts that should help. With diabetes the blood glucose (blood sugar) winds up too high, the opposite of insulinoma (a common ferret ailment) where blood sugar winds up too low. What you write does not add up for me unless some insulin with which you are medicating is having a strong effect at times. It sounds more like you mean insulinoma which is the functional opposite of diabetes. For insulinoma Prednisolone and Diazoxide/Proglycem are the drugs of choice and many vets also use surgery. For diabetes but NOT for insulinoma Brewers Yeast or other chromium sources can be useful. Balasz, your vet is not used to the way ferret livers respond to lack of food or trouble digesting it. This will help your vet. You will want to copy the entire article and send your vet to the website in general. It has a lot to help vets written by a vet pathologist who is a ferret expert, Dr. Bruce Williams: http://www.afip.org/ferrets/index.html in this case specifically http://www.afip.org/ferrets/Clin_Path/ClinPath.html The paragraphs below are carried here with their author's permission: Probably the most common misinterpretation that I see on a routine basis is in the area of hepatic enzymes. Remember, that the ferret, being by nature an obligate carnivore, has an extremely short digestive tract, and requires meals as often as every four to six hours. Should food not be available, it possesses the ability to quickly mobilize peripheral fat stores in order to meet energy requirements. When this physiologic mechanism is activated, the liver is literally flooded with fat, which results in hepatocellular swelling which may be marked. The result of this swelling is the leakage of membrane enzymes such as alanine aminotransferase, and as the hepatocellular swelling increases, occlusion of bile canaliculi occurs, resulting, over time, in elevation of alkaline phosphatase. In conjunction with this physiologic change, elevations of ALT up to 800 mg/dl can be seen, and alkaline phosphatase up to approximately 100 mg/dl. This often causes confusion to practitioners, who render an erroneous diagnosis of unspecified hepatic disease. However, hepatic disease is quite uncommon in this species; the most common cause of true hepatic disease in the ferret is neoplasia, with lymphosarcoma causing 95% of cases. Rarely bacterial infections of the liver or biliary tree may be seen. The diagnosis of hepatic disease in the ferret must be based not only on ALT and alkaline phosphatase, but other clinical indicators in the CBC and chem panel. Clinical elevation of icterus or an elevated bilirubin is an excellent indicatior of primary hepatic disease, or concomitant leukocytosis or pyrexia may lend additional credence to a diagnosis of primary hepatic disease. [Posted in FML issue 4716]