I sent a reply off to the person questioning whether to use a water filter or not. His/her reply back to me stated that there were many replies discussing taste, but not many addressing health issues. That made me think that maybe I should bring it up as a discussion. It seems to me that there are 3 primary environmental issues with our ferrets. Air, food, and water. We are spending a heck of a lot of time discussing food (possibly because it is what we have the most control over). I'm no expert on the subject, but I've heard a lot of things that make me think maybe we should be looking a little more closely at the water, too. I think we have all heard that chlorine is a bad thing, it's just not as bad as the nasties that would grow in our water if it wasn't there. So that alone would be a good reason to filter your water. Especially drinking water, although I believe that chlorine can be absorbed through the skin, too. (And, I don't remember exactly why chlorine is bad - hey, I said I wasn't an expert...) There was an HBO special on breast cancer some months (years?) ago. This special showed that a correlation was discovered in a certain community between occurrence of breast cancer and women living on culdesacs. The reason that they came up with was that the water mains terminated on the culdesacs, and the heavy metals in the water accumulated there. Not proof, but enough to make you think. And, if that IS the reason, wouldn't our little 1-4 lb furrries be more susceptible to it than a human would? Kind of like the canary in the mine shaft? So, if humans are effected by a larger dose than usual of these minerals, perhaps ferrets have problems at a much lower level, one that is within acceptable bounds for human consumption. Even if it isn't the heavy metals, we all know there is all sorts of nasty things that are allowed (and are even purposefully added) to be in our drinking water. I don't have any kind of proof, but filtering drinking/cooking water is one of the "better safe than sorry" things that I live by. But I have only adopted that in about the last 3-4 years, and I don't maintain a large population of ferrets. So I can't even speculate if it has effected us one way or the other. Has anyone seen any situations that might support/debunk this theory? Large households of ferrets who drink well water that seem to have less (or more) problems than other groups? Correlation between cancer rates in households who filter and those that don't in the same area? - Nancy [Posted in FML issue 2313]