To Anne Charbonneau: >Question about milk: > I was surprised to read that Dave from UK gives drops of milk to >ferrets and that Hillary gave milk and cream to kitten. I thought that >milk induce diarrhea in ferret!?! Drops of milk probably won't do much in a ferret. You need a little more. The reason that cats and ferrets get diarrhea from milk is that when they are weaned, and no longer get regular dosease of milk, they lose the enzymes needed to digest it. So the milk sugar just sits undigested in the GI tract, and actually draws water into the gut to dilute the concentration. This is known as an osmotic diarrhea. But if this ferret has had milk all its life, it would still have those enzymes and would have no problem with it... If you're as old as I am, you probably remember collecting pennies for UNICEF. UNICEF would then buy powdered milk and send it to impoverished African countries. Well, a lot of these people did not consume milk as their normal diet, so when they drank it, they got diarrhea, and thought the Americans were trying to poison them....I think it ended up in the fields as fertilizer... Bruce H. Williams, DVM Dept. of Veterinary Pathology Chief Pathologist, AccuPath Armed Forces Institute of Pathology [log in to unmask] Washington, D.C. 20306-6000 [log in to unmask] [Posted in FML issue 1240]