Gosh, it just hit me that there actually were 4 poisoning cases I was seeking info on over a space of two days to help the ferrets' people, not 3 cases. Sometimes things just clump. Anyway, I am now very sensitive (downright tender) about people having ferrets accidently poisoned, so, please, DO read about precautions beforehand so that such accidents can be avoided. If you have a ferret die of unknown causes in a situation where poisoning is possible be sure to add toxicology as well as pathology done on tissue samples after the necropsy. (A plain necropsy tells very little; also ferret tissues begin breaking down anywhere from a couple to a few hours after death (gall bladder and then GI tract and pancreas) to 2 days after death when the tissues are pretty well useless for finding out anything helpful. Do not freeze the remains or most of the pathology needed becomes impossible.) Please, if you learn first you can sometimes avoid a problem and that is truly best. BTW, I was wondering, given the ferrets and dogs with kidney failure: since grapes are so good at taking up iron and raisins are very high in iron if anyone has looked at whether grapes might also uptake and set in the fruit some other heavy metals. I know that some other possible causes have been looked at already (the sorts of things a person thinks of off-hand like the pesticides, fungicides, etc.), but not if anyone looked for heavy metals. Of course, the cause may be something intrinsic to grapes themselves, like one of the skin phytocompounds which are so useful for human health. -- Sukie (not a vet) Ferret Health List co-moderator http://www.smartgroups.com/groups/ferrethealth FHL Archives fan http://ferrethealth.org/archive/ replacing http://fhl.sonic-weasel.org International Ferret Congress advisor http://www.ferretcongress.org [Posted in FML issue 5108]