We have met a large male ferret (a breeder in Montana) about 20 years ago who weighed about 6 (six) pounds and he was not obese, just big and muscular. It was a dirt floor house made a cinder block and it was winter so they all had incredible coats but that can not have been comfortable for anyone with any number of legs. The people were making do with what they had and keeping everyone fed. The ferrets were all in one or two very large communal cages and very, very dirty and greasy but during Winter in Montana in a house with little heat a bath would be a bad idea. BTW, he was young, and very placid and friendly. They were trying to breed ferrets for money, had been at it only a few years, and I don't know where they got their ferrets from. However, long, long ago there were some private breeders working on a large size breed they called demi giga (if my memory serves). I have not heard of that in ages so I guess there may have been either some sort of major health problem, or a failure to breed true, or a lack of interest. Any of the three is possible and quite a few of the fancy ferret types purposely bred through the years have turned out to have serious health problems. Anyway, those were described to me once in an email as being even larger than that male Steve and I met, but we never met one. Oh, GADS, now I see who was working on them (Thank goodness for archives!): <http://listserv.ferretmailinglist.org/SCRIPTS/WA-FERRET.EXE?A2=ind0102&L=FERRET-SEARCH&P=R15819> I think most people here know about the later rescue effort from that Ohio farm. Nothing in the archives tells their actual sizes, though. Sukie (not a vet) Recommended ferret health links: http://pets.groups.yahoo.com/group/ferrethealth/ http://ferrethealth.org/archive/ http://www.afip.org/ferrets/index.html http://www.miamiferret.org/ http://www.ferrethealth.msu.edu/ http://www.ferretcongress.org/ http://www.trifl.org/index.shtml http://homepage.mac.com/sukie/sukiesferretlinks.html all ferret topics: http://listserv.ferretmailinglist.org/archives/ferret-search.html "All hail the procrastinators for they shall rule the world tomorrow." (2010, Steve Crandall) On change for its own sake: "You can go really fast if you just jump off the cliff." (2010, Steve Crandall) [Posted in FML 6878]