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first off im not tring to get everyone to fired up or pissed off this is just from what i have seen and heard from working at a vet clinic and i dont mean to offend anyone either with this topic.


from what i have heard and seen at the clinic Adrenal Disease in ferrets does not seem to be caused by having them fixed. the reason why i think that is a co-workers ferret is showing the signs of Adrenal Disease but the ferret hasnt been fixed(i think the ferret is between 8 and 10 years old to).

i have heard that light can cause Adrenal Disease to but personaly i dont belive that light could cause it since i havnt heard or read anything saying how light could cause Adrenal Disease yet....

anyone have any thoughts they want to share about this?

very interesting i wouldn't have thought that light would be such a big impacted on them because of how much the sleep.

haha yeah i just got them a couple of weeks ago though when im not at home i just leave the window blinds open for the sun light to come in, my mother gets pissed off at me when i leave my room/ferret room lights on

Our ferret room is our finished basement. The windows aren't big enough to do that. sweatdrop

Sunlight is best though. So you're okay there.

little off topic but from what i remembering from health class most cancers in humans are caused by 2 or 3 things, 1 being do to genetics, 2 different chemicals the most known being from smoking, and 3 UV rays causing some types of skin cancer (this one can be counted as chemical to do to all the stuff humans are burning causing problems at the global scale no offence attended to anyone) now how about we get back to the ferret part of the topic

http://www.heidihoefer.com/pages/ferrets/ferret_adrenal_disease.htm

This link provides an answer as to why the 'fixing' process can be attributed to adrenal since it involves the sex hormones.

http://avmajournals.avma.org/doi/abs/10.2460/javma.2000.216.195

This is a more technical page dealing with a study of 50 ferrets with hyperadrenocorticism (adrenal) and 1,267 ferrets without hyperadrenocorticism. They basically discovered that the age at which you neuter a fuzzy may be directly involved in when they get adrenal.

Genetics is the main cause.
The genetic code starts to unravel and grow corupt with age. It's the same thing with animals(cause what are humans, biologically, other than evolved animals?).
It's a genetic defect inbred within ferrets since the specific breeds are so inbred that they don't have the genetic diversity required to be evolutionarily sucessful. That's why mutts in ferrets (and other animals?) live longer.

I work at a large veterinary hospital and 2 of the doctors were having a conversation a few months ago about how in the UK adrenal diseases in ferrets are a rare thing compared to how many ferrets in the USA get them. I asked the exotic doctor I work with about it and he said in his opinion it might be something we do differently in either the breeding or the neutering process. He also mentioned it could be genetics and that the ferrets in other parts of the world simply have better genes than American ferrets. Which leads back to the breeding issue because it's likely when Americans first started breeding ferrets we wern't concerned about things like breeding healthy and fit ferrets, it was more of a supply and demand issue so quantity was more of a concern than health quality. Kinda the same concept as puppy mill pups. There are plently of puppy mills out there that produce dogs who get sick very easily and are prone to more genetic problems because unlike breeders most puppy mills don't care about how healthy the mother and father are, they just want puppies to sell for profit. To me that sounds pretty reasonable.