While the risk of contracting diseases or having injuries from raw meat and bones is low, it does exist. The problem is that when it happens the diseases encountered are so often very difficult to treat and too often fatal. If a person checks in the FML and FHL Archives there will be repeated comments found by at least a half dozen vets (having counted them in the past) on just how hard it is to save a ferret with salmonella, how bad intestinal avian TB can be to treat, how death of all potentially infected animals is typical (and in many countries mandatd) with intestinal bovine TB, and even how an E. coli infection is too often not a walk in the park. Choices are individual. Read fully, especially things by the veterinary experts, on both sides of this topic, weigh the risks, and then make your own choices. For some reason the closest thing many food discussions too often parallel in posters' behavior after a while is discussions on religious choices, and often with the same pitfalls (sadly not joking). Just know that it is your choice and there is nothing which is perfect. Our own personal choice is not to feed raw because even with a low infection rate I know too danged much about the illnesses involved, but others will make entirely different choices, and making one's own choices on this at this stage of lack of reputable information is akin to there being nothing wrong with a person choosing to be an Animist, or a Muslim, or a Buddhist, or a Jew, or a Christian, or... In other words, without enough data a lot of what anyone chooses if based on faith, no matter how the person may paint it. It is a personal choice, hopefully based on information about the ups and the downs of each of the possible choices, and hopefully then the person making her or his own selection with an open mind and tolerance. As Darwin wrote (but he looked at the other side of the "The more I know, the more I realize that there is to learn." equation: "Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge." -- 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 5157]