Dale's vet suggests that the practice of spaying and neutering at a very early age may be the cause of adrenal disease. Well, our shelter has quite a few ferrets that went the whole six months or more before spay/neuter and they have developed adrenal disease at the same rate as those spayed/neutered young. Kind of blows the theory. My own personal speculation is that because ferrets simply suffer from a naturally short lifespan, like humans, they develop cancers at mid and late life. This in a ferret is 4-5 years. The same thing happens with the wild black-footed ferrets. In the wild they rarely live beyond 4 years of age-- that's when they start to slow down and thus become lunch for a faster predator. Now that many have been kept in captive breeding programs for their entire lives and have lived to be 8, 9 and even 10 years old, they also often die of cancers. Not something which normally causes death in the wild. Of course, we do see young ferrets develop cancers, too. And we see human children also develop cancer, so it isn't always age-related. But generally it is a disease of the aging process Ferret Rescue of the Western States, Colorado Springs [Posted in FML issue 2678]