Sorry that I haven't mentioned this first part earlier; it had to wait because of some health problems with older relatives which have been paramount recently. Anyway, someone about a week back asked about a ferret which had lost weight and acted sick weeks after having an allergic reaction. First of all, ANY time a ferret shows what might be serious health problems the ferret must get veterinary care. Second, here's something I learned from personal experience and know it's true in humans (plus seems like the sort of thing which is likely to be able to generalize to other critters such as ferrets). After I almost died when I suddenly developed severe allergies in my 20s the physicians said that with humans one of the most common times to develop new allergies is young adulthood and that's especially the case if the individual is facing difficulties which stress the body. (I was dealing with a tropical disease I'd picked up in the Amazon Basin, another problem which later wound up requiring major surgery, and a pregnancy which miscarried during the time when I developed allergies, plus I was going to school full time and working to finance most of that. Don't know how I did it.) What I am getting at here is that even though it might SEEM like the allergic reaction has been the precursor of health problems which happen afterward, the reality might be that there was an existing illness or disorder which simply wasn't prominent enough to notice yet though the ferret's body was already stressed. That such a health difficulty would show up afterward should not be a surprise in this case. This is just a hypothesis, of course, but it might be something to keep in the back on your mind. First ferret: our first one was an unaltered male from a breeder sometime in the early 80s back before there was really any established ferret health care knowledge. She told us to feed him any cat foods, said to keep him in a aquarium (Said that drafts kill them. :-o!), and that was it! The first time he played we thought he was having convulsions. Had to SOON take him back and later have a female when Steve developed incredibly bad allergies to adult male musk. The funny part is that neither of us wanted a ferret at the time but WE EACH THOUGHT THAT THE OTHER ONE DID! Basically, he pushed to get the ferret because he thought I wanted it and I pushed because I thought he wanted it! (Those things still happen to us sometimes but not as dramatically.) You know where it went from there. Some very sad encounters happened early on. People were selling fur fitch which didn't tame down easily as ferrets and a lot got destroyed, and a number of people wanted to get in on the brand new fad pet. One woman in very northwestern N.J. (Can't recall name.) advertised for starting a N.J. ferret club back then; asked her how long her's lived (We had read three books by then -- two of them British and had ballpark figure.) and she casually replied something like, "Oh, you know, one or two years." which I knew even then was horrid, then she added that with 80 of them running around their short life span wasn't a problem! Plus, it turned out that they were all breed from the same two originals and they mated willy-nilly. That was when I first made the acquaintance of one of the humane groups here -- to shut her down! There were also the heartbreaks associated with the lack of health knowledge back then which is why I get so exasperated when people won't use what is known. QUESTIONS: There have recently been requests for info or statements about licensing shelters, becoming non-profit, and becoming tax deductible. Steve and I do NOT have a shelter, though I recall from experience with a science education charity that becoming tax deductible (so that donors can deduct monies given from taxes) is a FEDERAL process which can easily take a year or so. Licensing, and being listed as non-profit (for the shelter or club's sake tax-wise) are STATE procedures which are going to vary state by state. COULD PEOPLE IN EACH STATE WHO KNOW ABOUT THESE PROCEDURES POST HOW IT IS DONE (NAMING STATE/DISTRICT/TERRITORY/COLONY/PROTECTORATE...) SO ALL CAN LEARN ABOUT THEIR STATE? COULD SOMEONE FAMILIAR WITH THE FEDERAL PROCESS TO BECOME TAX DEDUCTIBLE FOR DONORS POST ABOUT THAT? Hey, it's wouldn't hurt if people in other countries let folks know how it's done there, either. Maybe if enough info arrives someone will throw it on a webpage (after getting authors' permissions). It would be very handy for people to have this info someplace accessible! Maybe the folks who run SOS and Star Ferrets (Pam, Georgia, Judith, and Ela) would even find it handy; I can imagine that people might assume they have all sort of esoteric info right at their fingertips. [Posted in FML issue 2609]