Hello, thank you for joining today's webinar. Doctor Madonna Livingstone is our speaker tonight, and she's going to talk about reproductive medicine in ferrets. If you have any questions throughout the presentation, please place them in the Q&A box.

We will have a few minutes to answer them at the end. Madonna qualified from Glasgow vet school in 2002. She joined the Arc Veterinary Clinics in 2004 and has grown the exotic side of the practise.

Although her main interest is in exotic animal species, she also enjoys soft tissue surgery and behaviour of all species. Madonna is an exotics consultant for nationwide laboratories, which includes interpretation interpretation of results for many different species. On her day off from clinical practise, Madonna lectures on exotic animal medicine and surgery, teaches clinical skills in small exotic mammals and rabbit surgery at Glasgow University veterinary school.

Also, an affiliated vet. With Glasgow vet school, she is the nominated veterinary surgeon for all the exotic teaching animals. She also has a diploma in parrot behaviour, has been published on reptiles, parrots, and ferrets, including a peer-reviewed journals.

Madonna speaks widely throughout the UK on exotic animal medicine and surgery to vets and vet nurses. She has also spoken several times. At the Scottish Pirro Society and the Scottish branch of International Herpathological Society to owners and enthusiasts.

Madonna is a member of the raid Welfare and Association Fund, the Tortoise Trust, Clyde bird ringing Group, the Scottish Ferret Club, British Veterinary Zoological Society, and the Veterinary Invertebrate Society, and has a strong interest in conservation. So Madonna, thank you so much for being here with us and over to you please for your presentation. Thanks, thanks for you for that introduction and thank you everybody for taking the time out of their hectic days to, to join us tonight.

And that makes me sound like a busy lady. I, and I am, I am a busy lady, but that's because I'm a workaholic. But that is also because I am extremely fortunate enough to have a job that's also my hobby.

So this is me, at one at the vet school in the clinical skills corridor with 6 of my my pet ferrets that I use for teaching. So I've been keeping ferrets for 22 years, pet ferrets for 20 years, and the public's perception and some vets' perception of ferrets is that that they're, they're very aggressive and very bity and that they're stinky, when actually to people that know and love these, these playful little creatures, their nature's Prozac to me they're, they really are happy pills, . I mean, who doesn't like a species that giggles when it's happy, they're just amazing little curs.

And for me, and one of the things that I, I always strive to teach is that the human animal one doesn't stop, with just dogs and cats. It can be any kind of animal. The human one bond is really, really strong.

And the average lifespan for ferrets is 7 to 8 years, although they can make it into double figures. And yeah, I certainly bond just as tightly to my ferrets as I do to all my other species. So.

Oh, as I, I will go back. Let's have a look at sexual dimorphism. Let's sex are ferrets.

So there's two ferrets here, and the dark coloured one is a hop, and the pale coloured one is a gel. So hob is a male, Jill is a female, and the hogs are twice the size of the gel, so that's actually a mother and son. OK, so the surob Bob is the pale coloured one and Eros is the, the polecat colour.

How do you sex them as individuals? Well, in the hops, on the hops I should say, on a third of the way across the central aspect of the abdomen, this is not a belly button, as a lot of people actually do think that's actually prepius, and these are the testicles, the, the wounds there that looks really messy, it's actually because of the wounds glue, not. Being a perfectionist or anything, which obviously I totally am any who .

That animal was dead for a vasectomy. And this is Eros, I hope you saw earlier, with the polecats, you tend to find it's much easier to see the prepius because there's no pigment in the skin, so it's just a pink blob. The the testicles are situated just distal to the anus, very much where a tomcats would be, and the male penis has a gy shaped o penis here, OK, which I've extruded.

And the gel, when she's not in season, has a very small slit-like vulva situated just distal to the anus, which have circled here in yellow. And I thought it would be useful to show you the different stages of swelling that the vulva goes through as they start to come into season cause I, I commonly get asked by vets how to tell when she's in season. So the albedo ferret on the left.

If your screen is very early season, so you can see that the vulva is is much more obvious than it was in the first picture and you can see that there's definite swelling around here. If you've got a regular animal, then it, it can be easier to miss. And then in this poleca coloured gel, the vulva is much more obvious, it's much pinker, and there's more of an obvious select.

And there's there's some gaping. And the gel on the left where there's no gaping here because of the the edoema and the walls of the vulva. And the full season usually takes about 10 days to reach the full swelling.

Now this gel did actually have a bright pink ulva, but the flash caused the vulva to look very pale, and you can see the the slit shape here, so it actually ends up looking like a big pink doughnut. Sexual maturity, how to . I'm just moving that I don't know if you can see that.

So this is one of the kits that I bred and this is at and. Ferrets become sexually mature this spring after they're born, OK? So the importance of that is, is that most, most kits will be born about kind of May June time.

But because most gels will cycle in spring because they come in season, they start to come into season kind of February March time with increasing day length, although I have seen gels come into season 15th of January before. So they'll almost be a year old when they become sexually mature. However, you can get autumn cycling gels, so we have to remember that the cats that are born in the autumn will become sexually mature at younger age, cause it's always the spring after they're born.

So the reproductive strategy in in ferrets is a little bit different, to some of our more familiar species. It's a highly aggressive mating. It can last for hours, about 3 hours, and there's a lot of screaming from the gill.

And gills are induced ovulators. And a lot of us know, if not all of us, that unmated gills can die, it's not actually a life tale, it is true, but why is that? Well, as I said, they are induced ovulators, but so.

Sorry, my slides aren't aren't behaving themselves, but so are rabbits and cats, but it's not the fact that they're induced ovulators that causes the problem, it's the fact that. Gels will not come out of season until they ovulate, so rabbits and cats, yes, they're induced ovulators, but they come in and out of season throughout the year, or throughout their breeding season. These gels will go into season, stay in season until one of three things happens, and that's either that the day length gets shorter.

Which naturally brings them out of season, until they ovulate. Or until they die. OK, so that's the 3, that's the 3 things without intervention, which will bring a gel out of season.

And this picture, forgive the quality of it, I took this picture about 18 years ago, and this gel had come in with a client. And the, the gel was, you can see she's been in a long time, she's lost a lot of fur due to her hormones. She's an older gill, she's got a cataract, and she was actually severely anaemic.

There were two gels on that day. And I said to the guy, look, she needs, she needs, I need to test her for anaemia. I think this gel's in a bad way, and I think, I think you're gonna lose her.

And I got the, basically. I'm being polite, but about what he said, but it was you're just a daft wee lassie, hen, you don't know what you're talking about. I've been keeping ferrets for 30 years, I've never had a problem, blah blah blah.

And they wouldn't take any treatment for either of the gels, so they left. And then I got a phone call from his adult son a couple of days later to say, you're right, that gel did die. Can I bring the other one I need to get gel jacked.

So sometimes it can be difficult to get people on board, because they have got away with it in the past, but because they stay in season for so long, you can get oestrogen induced bone marrow suppression, and that causes suppression of all the lines. It's not just red blood cells, that's the leukocytes and and thrombocytes as well, and that that can lead to death. And we will touch on that condition later in the presentation and you can see in the bottom right hand of your screen, this is rat tail in a gill and hobs get it during the breeding season and sometimes owners panic and think this is adrenal gland disease, but it usually starts at the tip of the tail and works its way up, whereas adrenal gland disease more often would start at the base of the tail.

So how do we prevent oestrogen induced bone marrow suppression, because all the different options, can stress a lot of vets and vet nurses out, and a lot of owners out, to be fair. So prevention, what are our options? Well, we can make them, or we can make them to what we term a sham mating, which is put them to a vasectomy ho.

We can jab them with either couron, which is I can't say it's human chorionic gonadotrophin I think it is, or we can jab them with Elviseron. We can surgically neuter them. Or we can implant them.

OK, and every single one of these options have the pros and cons. And how many are you confused yet? Because there's a lot of options there and not all of them are recommend, but we're gonna go through each option and give you the pros and cons, because I feel it's about teamwork with the owners, giving them the most up to-date information so between the two of you you can make an informed decision for that pet.

So mating, foods, well, it's natural, there's no initial cost to the owner. And pregnancy and ferrets is 42 days, it's about 6 weeks is average. Gills that have never given birth before actually are more likely to go on day 41.

You can diagnose pregnancy by ultrasound and ferrets at day 12, and the foetuses will be about 3 to 5 millimetres at that stage or on day 14 forward you can palpate them. I, I usually do an ultrasound. I usually just palpate.

And dystopia is quite uncommon in pet ferrets, and colonies of ferrets it's, it's stated or quoted to being about 1%, and it's actually rare in pet ferrets. And the birthing process is quite quick. It's usually over in about 2 to 3 hours.

So mating cos this is a, a, well, you get kits at the end of it, OK, so this is a litter of newborn ferret kits that one of my gels produced and. The average litter size is between 6 and 8, but they can have up to 1314 kits. It's a lot of homes to find, and there are already a lot of ferrets and rescues.

And it's, although it's not expensive to breed because it's just letting animals, you know, have sex, essentially, but it is expensive to rear them properly on good quality foods and give them options of variety of types of foods because ferret kits do. Print on food, I smell at a relatively young age, so I always make sure my kits have been exposed to various qualities of, wet foods and dry foods, so that when they go to their new homes, they're less likely to be fussy about what foods they eat because some ferrets will just eat anything and other fer ferrets will literally starve themselves to death if they don't get their preferred food item. Because a lot of ferrets now are kept indoors as pets, and a lot of owners have never experienced ferret mating before, they find the aggressive mating quite distressing.

They find the fact that the gill has to drag the bedragged about by the hob. And has to experience the neck bite while his ero penis hits her cervix before she's induced ovulate. I mean, somebody really played an evolutionary joke in this species, and they find that quite distasteful because their baby is being attacked.

So, a lot of owners will find that upsetting. So if an owner tells me they want to pay their credits, oh that's fine. Have you done it before?

Do you know what to expect and go through it with them, and some of them actually do change their minds. Because of the aggressive nature of their mating, then the gels do develop a thicker scruff during breeding season, because the scruff injuries, as you can see here are actually quite common, where you get it almost looks like wet eczema and it's very, it can be painful, it can get infected. And of course the Latin for ferret is msily reorious furo, which literally stands for weasel, sorry, it stands for mouse eating stinky thief.

So mating means that they're hormonally active, which does not reduce the smell. And although I love the smell of ferret out with the breeding season. Male entire ferret during breeding season weeks, it really does stink.

So if you've got them in your house, then owners can sometimes be quite distressed by that smell. So sham meetings, well, again, the same as and it's natural and there's no kits produced. And the term for a vasectomized hob is a hole, and he can serve multiple gels for life, and if she goes into fall, if she comes into season quite early in spring, summertime, so say she came into season in January, she might go into falls pregnancy for 42 days and then come back into season, and then he's available to meet her again.

Whereas if she's been late coming into season, she doesn't come into season till March, then often they won't come back into season again after the, the false pregnancy. So you've got that hope who can do the deed as it were, whenever the needs him to. Sham mating cons are the initial cost of the surgery.

Failure of surgery, it can. Happen, and you know I have had to correct some surgeries, that have been referred to me where the hob's been vasectomized and then going on to father 3 or 4 litters of ferrets, because it's fiddly surgery and owners aren't aware of it and I, you know, I tell owners when I, when I'm in that situation where I'm having to correct the surgery, well, it's because it's hard. Yeah, it, it's very tiny structures.

And I'll go into how to vasectomies in a few minutes. You tend to find that people that have vasectomized hobs will often share them with other ferret people. You will see in forums somebody saying, is anybody got a vasectomized hob, can I borrow them?

And there is a risk that that could spread diseases. And of course, because they're still hormonally active, there's no reduction in smell. I've put hormones at the bottom there, that's what I call their hormones because gills in a false pregnancy, just like a bitch in a false pregnancy can be grumpy.

And hobbs can be grumpier when they're hormonally active, cos they're, they're testosteroneed out of their brain, essentially, and that can disrupt the human animal bonds because most people think human, not animal, and they don't understand why their normally affectionate, loving baby is suddenly standoffish or a little bit grumpy. And it's just because they're very, very hormonal. So how do I anaesthetize ferrets?

Well, and I know this isn't a ferret, this is a skunk, but that's because I suddenly realised I didn't have any pictures of mass induction and ferrets, which is remiss of me, so I will get that sorted. And in the UK. It's illegal to remove the scent glands in ferrets and skunks.

It's classed as an unnecessary mutilation. So you're only allowed to take the scent glands out or the anal sacs out if there's a medical reason for it. So this skunk that I was about to speak.

Was entire from the point of view she still had her glands, and although ferrets can't squish and spray their anal secretion skunks can, I was very fortunate that this skunk was not trigger happy and I had pre-meded it with Tom and Thorpe. 1 kilogramme cat dose, before I'm asking just and, and that was her conscious she's still standing and she wasn't bothered at all. So in ferrets, I do one of two things.

I sometimes use triple combination subcats, it's Domorquetamine, and I use it at the triple combo cat dose for a 1 kilogramme cap. Or if it's for a quick procedure, a quick non-painful procedure, then I will burrito the ferret. Put a mask over it.

Give it oxygen for 4 breaths. I can, I used to do it for a minute, and then I read a study that showed that you only need 4 breaths of 100% oxygen to get your blood saturated and any more than that you potentially just be stressing pet out. And then I go straight to 5% Iso.

And yeah, they don't like the smell, but they're asleep within 30 seconds. And minimal stress. I think if you put them induction chambers, they get stressed because it takes longer for them to get to sleep, and they, they poo and they pee and they roll out in it.

Whereas if a brito them, there's no poo, there's no pee, and they're asleep very, very quickly. And yes, some people may argue that cause they don't like the smell, they find it, find it distressing, they really don't like injections either. So, it's all about what's within your ethical boundaries, but for me, I'm, I'm quite happy to do that if need be.

And then, I will intubate, and it is just like intubating a cat, just a very small cat, so I will use inubbs because they have got very sensitive larynxes, and I usually, in the hobs it'll be a 2.5 tube. For the ska and the gels, it's usually a 1.5 to 2 tune, but again you get variations on that the way that you do with any other species trachea.

So for vasectomies, To me, It makes sense to make life easy for yourself, life's hard enough, and sometimes as vets we're we're self-destructive because we want to try and and help all the time. But out with breeding season, the testicles shrink down, which means all the associated structures shrink down, which means it's even harder to vasectomize them. So I tend to find that you're more likely to get it wrong if you vasectomise during out with breeding season.

So Hobbs Tesco start to get bigger and end of December. Because they're a month or, or sorry, mid December because they, they come in season a month before the gels do so by the time the gels are in season, the, the hobs are full of testosterone, so we. I, I start vasectomizing from the end of December onwards because everything's big, so it makes it easier.

And the other thing to remember is your anatomy, because The vet the structure that vets tie off, thinking it's the vast deference and it's not, is a ligament. Outside of the vaginal tunic and it's caught me out a couple of times when I, when I, is it, is it not, is it, especially when I first started doing them and then I would mentally slap myself and see, of course it can't be it because your spermatic cord, your vast is going to be inside the vaginal tunic. But it can be easy sometimes to forget that when you're stressed and when you're just trying to, you know, get through this surgery and you're just like, oh, I didn't want to have to do this and somebody booked it in and it's their day off and they've made me do it.

And we do forget, forget these things first if you go back to basics, think about your anatomy, that's, that's, it's got to be inside the vaginal tunics. So if you've not gone into the vaginal tunic, you cannot be seeing your vass. So I'm hoping you can see my pointer here.

This thin structure over my glove is the vaginal tunic, OK? The structure that's blanched white, that is in my forceps is the vast deference. And this big chunky monkey here is the vascular bundle, and the vascular bundle you want to ensure you don't damage, because that is what keeps your testicle alive, and of course the whole point of vasectomy is that the testicle's alive because you want it to.

Sage the fire blanks, OK? So you need to ensure that you go inside your, your sorry your Chin, your vaginal chick. So that's the tunic lining here.

I'm just making it a little bit more obvious. So, just so that you can orientate yourself, testes here. He is to the right of the screen.

That's your vascular bundles of exterior eyes and this hob. That's your vast deference. And your vast deference is a white tube that runs up the centre where your sperm gets carried and it has a blood vessel either side of it, which you should see in the next slide.

Pain testicles are down here. I just, I do one incision midline, but you can do two incisions, one in front of each scroll sac, whatever makes you happy, or decreases your stress levels. They heal the same way.

So you can see on these scissors I've isolated the vasteins in the centre and there's a blood vessel on either side, and this here is your vascular bunder, that's the bit you don't want to damage. This bit you don't really damage these blood vessels is fine if you're gonna ligate. So what we do is, or what I do is I ligate here.

And I like it there. And I take away a centimetre in the middle, and the reason I double like A is so that I can't get re-canalisation, which could cause failure of my operation. And you can send away this, and some, some techs certainly recommend sending this away to ensure that you've got the vast deference, and I don't.

Routinely send them off. I really don't, I've never done it once in 20 years, and that's because it had the the ferret had weird anatomy and I wasn't convinced that I got the right bit. And the bit that I thought, the only other bit that I thought could have been the vast, the vascular bunder bundle actually spiralled round it, so there was no way of me getting to it.

I do tell owners if they want to pay extra, I can send it off for histopathology, but what I do do is I keep these in formalin in in a tube labelled with the ferret's name and details, and I keep them for 6 months. So that if any unscrupulous owner says, oh, you've sexized my ferret, and it's now gone on and fathered other cats. I can prove that that the er I vasectomy didn't they've they've used another hop, OK, that's a self-protection thing, not that I've ever had to do that, but I'm a paranoid android, OK.

And what I do warn owners of is that it's very common after vasectomies to get extensive bruising in ferrets. This was about 4 days post vasectomy, and I don't know why, and I've not been able to find anything in the literature that explains why. It wasn't like this, this animal had any bleeding.

And there was no bleeding when I closed it up, and there was no bruising even when I sent it home, but it spontaneously resolves. I just warn owners, it can happen, don't worry about it. And I tell them not to use the hob.

For at least 7 or 8 weeks. After the operation, because just like, and how I explain it is like, well, if men get vasectomized, they could still potentially father children for several weeks because they might have swimmers in the tubes and the they have to degenerate. So rest them for at least 7 or 8 weeks before you let them near any gills and heat.

The gel jabs, that's the Delsteron jab or some people pronounce it theosterone. I've always pronounced Delsteron. It's licenced.

So in the UK under the Cascade system, we have a licenced product, so that's the one that we should use. It's effective within a week, so that's the pro, the pros. Whenever you give it, so it's half a mil given subcutaneously and it does not affect fertility.

So we can give her the ja jab and by her next season, hopefully next year, hopefully she's not a spring cycle an autumn cycler, she can get pregnant if we want her to get pregnant. Cons are stings, right, so in the 22 years. I've had where I've kept and worked with ferrets, I've been bitten twice.

And both times were by gels, and both times it was given gill jabs, and it was before I learned the distraction technique of unsweetened peanut butter or salmon oil, because it stings like hell. And because the, the bottle, technically speaking, going by the licence is single use, it's very expensive unless you have ill jab days where, you know, you can use bottle up in a 24 hour period. It doesn't reduce any any odour to the gel.

Most gels don't smell very strongly, but it doesn't reduce odour, and you can need to, sometimes you do need to give it more than once a year. The gel that last year I had, I gave a gel jab to on the 15th of January was back in, in May, even another one, cause she's come in to eat so early, she came back in, and about 20% of gels will are also autumn cyclers as well as spring cyclers. And it can cause boldness.

It's very common for it to cause baldness at the injection sites, always warn owners of this. And you do get, you do get show gels. People do show their ferrets.

So it, you know, that's obviously going to affect any showing potential. And it can, I was grateful to my colleague John Chetty for lending me this picture. It can increase the risk of pymetra.

Now pyometer's not that common in ferrets, but as it does state in the data sheet that there's an increased potentially an increased incident in animals that have had Delvester on getting a pile at their next season. So HCG Coulon, it's not licenced. In the UK, it, it's 100 international units intramuscularly you get 10 days after the vulvas starts to enlarge.

And it should cause the gel to off and Like 3 days. But if the vulva hasn't started to go down after a week, that means she's not ovulated, so you have to go out again. And repeat injection carries the risk of anaphylactic shock.

In the gel and it increases, giving the HCG increases the risk of ovarian neoplasia. So to my mind. Given the fact that The gel jab can it works within a week to bring the gel out of heat.

Doesn't carry a risk of anaphylaxis and doesn't increase the risk of varying neoplasia. In my opinion, there we have no reason to use HCG in the UK because cost is not a factor that we're allowed to take into consideration when we're utilising the cascade system and I'm, I'm always totally honest guys, I've never used HCG in gels because of the. But I, I wanted it as in the lecture so I wanted to make sure that I was better for you.

So such your commutering prose. So this, this ferret was in for chestration. Can you see I've elevated the thorax.

And that's just so that the abdominal organs fall away from the. Diaphragm make it easier for the animal to breathe, and I've not intubated this particular individual. Probably because it's ration in all honesty, it doesn't take me very long to do them, which, yeah, I should incubate it, but in this case I didn't.

So pros of surgical uttering is permanent. It's relatively inexpensive, it's dead easy to do it, you straighten them just like dogs. Reduces odour, and ferrets are really good healers.

You adequately analgeize them, they leave their wings alone. They're they're such hardy little animals. There you go, an intubated one, but now I'm being self-critical because there's too much dead space cos I haven't shortened the tube.

But hey, at least you know I'm, I'm a real vet in the real world and I don't, I'm not perfect. Surgical neutering the cons, well there is a proven link to developing adrenal gland disease. That's proven, OK.

There is a surgical risk. It is small. But anytime we do surgery, there is a risk.

That's why we get them to sign consent forms. And we can't choose to feed later, which might sound obvious, but you know, there have been times where I've implanted some of my own ferrets, and then later I'm like, oh I really want, I would love to take a letter from this one. And at least I know I've got that chance when the implant wears off.

OK. So why does anal adrenal gland disease develop? What is the current theory?

Well, an entire ferrets, and this is really, this is simplifieddy, so forgive, forgive me if any of you're really into endocrinology. This is just how I simplify 5 things in my brain so that I remember them. So in ferrets, you get increasing day length, and that's the stimulus to come into heat.

So that hits the brain, pine gland brain, and then GRHs produced and then it produces, it talks to other parts of the brain and the LH and FSH produced. It goes to the goad, so testicles if you're a boy, ovaries if you're a girl, but ferrets and in all other species, it goes to the adrenal gland as well. However, ferrets have a much bigger area of their adrenal gland that have receptors for it.

So what happens is that these organs produce sex hormones. And when you've got the gonads, the gonads then say, right, we've got sex hormones, they produce a negative provide a negative feedback to the brain to say, OK, we've got enough, please stop. Telling us to do it, we've got enough sex hormones, we don't need to produce any anymore.

That that's the story in entire credits. And I, I explain this to owners, I think if they understand that they're more likely to agree with it. So if you've surgically neutered the ferret, well, you're still get increasing day length, still talk to the brain and the brain will talk to the adrenal glands and you can see therenal glands now get bigger because it's been chronically stimulated over time and.

How I explain it to owners is like, well, if you lift weights cause you're using your muscles more, your muscle gets better. Yeah, well, if you're using your, if you're er and you're using your adrenal gland or it gets bigger and it produces sex hormones. But there's no gonads to tell the brain to stop sending signals.

And eventually, if the ferret lives long enough. The area of the adrenal gland gets big enough, it produces enough sex hormone that you get clinical signs associated with it as if they're hormonally active. But if you implant them, so you can see now the gonads shrunk down compared to the first picture because if you're a male, the testicle shrinks away.

If when you're implanted so it's virtually undetectable, and I assume nobody will do the same. I just haven't been in to have a look. So then the increase in day length speaks your brain and then the GNRH actually stops the signal there before it gets to anything, OK.

And so that's why. And that's the current working theory anyway, as to why adrenal gland disease happens and why there's a proven link between adrenal gland disease and surgical neutering and ferrets. And it is a multi-factorial problem, I'm not gonna lie about that, but we can't control all the factors.

Yes, there's genetics involved in it. Yes, it's more common in America. They've got a much more limited genetic pool than we have causes a lot of them come from marshall farms and they're also neutered much younger, so they're neneuttured at like.

56 weeks of age, whereas we're gonna eat them, it's about 6 months. But can they still develop it, still can get adrenal gland disease. And increasing day length, well, a lot of people keep them in the house now, so they're being artificially, .

Artificial day length has been longer, we can't really control that, so the only factor that we can control is what advice we give for surgery. And if you're in like me, you get some very interesting views from your clients. So some of the, the, the things that I've heard from my clients are only American ferrets get a land disease.

Once I've stopped laughing, I explained to them that no, that's not true, it's just that it's more common there, and the reason it's more common there is partly genetics. Partly down to the fact that they're neutered so early and on average it's shown to take about 3 years to develop adrenal gland disease after neutering. Well, if we, And Yeah, if we knew it 6 months, then you could argue, well, it should be 3.5 months.

Sorry, sorry, it should be 3.5 years to develop it and that, in my experience, that doesn't seem to be the case in the UK that's where genetics come to come to play as well. But Some studies have shown that some ferrets are only a year old when they develop adrenal gland disease.

So it can happen in the UK, it can happen all over the world, but there's a higher incidence in the states without a doubt. Adrenal gland disease only happens if you use it too early. Well, that's out of date information because years ago, that's what a lot of us thought that it's, it was if you neutered them too young, they got it.

Where it's now been proven neuter them at all, they will develop a renal gland issues. In fact, if you speak to John Chitty, he says any anyone that he's postmortem, even if they didn't have clinical signs, they had an enlarged adrenal gland disease, so they just died of something else before they got to the stage where adrenal gland disease was causing an issue. And my, my, I love this one, my all time favourite, it's total nonsense, Madonna.

Adrenal gland disease caused the mutton's rubbish, total nonsense, because my mate's cousin's brother had an entire ferret and it got a renal gland disease. What do you make of that, eh? And my answer to that is Yeah, of course, that can happen because the adrenal gland is an organ and any organ can get cancer.

So you can get an organ, and you can get a tumour in any organ, and some of them will produce hormones. It just means that that animal was unlucky enough to get in a green bland tumour. We're talking about some us doing something to an animal that's likely to induce the tumour, OK?

And that's when I can't get my head round. My ferrets are safe because I feed them raw food. OK, I don't feed my my own ferrets raw foods.

I've seen too many problems with it, but yeah, I'll just leave that that little beauty with you. So orchestration, I only advise surgical chestration if there is Disease Process with Tesco so to stick and certainly but what is common is crucial tumours are very common in in ferrets and that's what the black is, that's a tumour in the prepeus, the oil and the oil gland about 75% malignant. OK.

So you need to surgically resect them. So I will recommend castration in cases of testicular tumours. And I will recommend surgical space if you've got uterine disease.

OK, that's the only time I recommend that if you've got uterine disease, if you've got a tumour in the uterus, if you think you've got ovarian, disease, then I, I will surgically. But what you have to know about spaying ferrets is, yeah, the approach is just like spaying a cat midline, OK, but. Ferrets, ovaries are in a burst of fat, OK.

Please do not be tempted to open the fat up to check you've got the ovary. The reason for that is that their ovaries are very prone to leaking. And if you open the burst up while you're in the abdomen, some of the ovary can leak out.

And that's when you get ovarian remnant syndrome, which is much more common in ferrets that are neutered at 5 to 6 weeks of age as opposed to older ferrets. But it is recognised that that's one of the risk factors is opening up into that bursa to check that you've got the ovary. Just trust your anatomy that you've got your ovary there and you can see the ends of the uterine horn.

By all means, you can, you can check post op if you want, you can palpate the ovary through the, through the fat. You can actually feel it. Just don't be tempted to open up into it when you're still in.

Ferrets can get new cameras, thank you to my colleague Sergio Savetti for very kindly giving me permission to use his photograph here. They say that woman a gill, and they're totally tiny wee animals. And how uncomfortable must that be?

And of course the present just the way any other species presents for the mucomuter distended abdomen, potentially fluid thrill if the, if it's big enough, and you know, ultrasound will confirm that you have a fluid filled due to this. And that's out of the abdomen. And you can see the ovaries and fat.

And pymetris, piles are much more likely to happen in animals that have hyperrogenism. I know I can't, I haven't said that properly, guys, I just can't pronounce it. If, if they've been in season too long because they get a neutropenia, so they're more prone to pyles and bronchop pneumonia, but any species that's got a uterus can get a pyometra.

Clinical signs are the same as in. Dogs or or queens that get it, you get you can get past the vulva, you feel a thicken in the abdomen ferrets generally quite relaxed abdomen, so it's quite easy to palpate things and again, when you ultrasound it, you would expect to see a pile just the way you would in the bitch. So For ligatures I should say I, I use viro.

I don't tend to use cat guts and its. I use virol, and I use for knot on a needle, for muscle and intradermals. I don't put skin stitches in because their tongue's slightly rough.

It's rougher than dogs but not as rough as the cats. I don't use bust collars because it's very difficult to keep them on because the ferret's neck is wider than its head. So they get off that easy, but as long as you get your analgesia right, they leave their wounds alone.

In my experience, So implants, so it's the 9.4 milligrammes licence in hops and certainly I've got up to 6 years out of a 9.4 implant in in a hob.

You have flexible control because it's not there, it's not permanent. There's no surgical risk and it reduces odour. Actually, it's showing to reduce the odour more than in surgically neutered animals.

And we don't know why yet. I thought that was quite cool, so I'd added it. Adrenal gland disease, implant pro sorry I question adrenal gland disease.

It's actually recognised treatment of the renal gland disease is is putting an implant in so it's in theory it can prevent it. And studies have shown that it increases plague behaviour, and ferrets compared to surgically neutered ferrets, which could be taken, one way of interpreting that is it's increasing the welfare because you only play when you're happy, you only play when you when you have high welfare. So I thought that was quite interesting as well.

So that's a The Needle's quite big and then it's very, very thick scruffs. I'm gonna speed up slightly, guys, I've obviously carried away, so, I've been when I inject in, I always give them a whiff of Izo break them, give them some Io, just explained earlier to knock them out because it's a hell of a big needle, and there have been some ferrets where the scruff has been so thick and hobs I've had to use a blade to cut the skin before I could get the implant in, so I don't want to be doing that to a conscious animal. And I rotate it as I put it in.

I only to use the cutting edge of the bevel. I only have the bevel covered. I don't need to put the whole needle in and then I inject it.

And as I, as I take them, the needle out, I'm holding the needle through the scruff, OK? That is the skin without me touching it afterwards. Look how open it is because the skin is so thick, and although it's not happening to me personally, anecdotally I've heard of happening in other places, the implants come back out.

So I always tissue glue. And I just warn the owners that I've tissue glued it because they feel a wee scabby bit. And plant corn I think we just lost the Madonna.

Let, let's give her a few seconds to see if it's not, it's not permanent. Hello, can you hear me now? Yes, we can hear you.

Sorry, sorry, sorry. I actually drove to my clinic so that the blinking internet would be better. Sorry guys.

So implant cos it's not permanent, it's all licencing gels. OK, both sizes. It can cause and then Initial hormonal surge.

So you need to be aware of that, and I'll go into that in a bit more detail in a minute. And it can be expensive. The reason I put two question marks after that is because we get to set the prices.

OK, clinics get to set the prices, and what I charge for a 4.7 milligramme implant for for els is 108 pounds. But the practise that my niece takes her her her ferrets to, wanted to charge for the same implant, told her it would be 350 pounds, the same implant.

And it'd be more if they knocked it out. And part of me wondered, is that because they don't really want to see ferrets, so they're trying to price themselves out of the market. So I don't really know what's going on there, and every, I'm certainly not going to tell people what to charge, because that is none of my business.

The point I'm making is that if you want to see ferrets, don't price yourself out of the market because, you know, I have a standard between 50 to 60% mark up on all my drugs. So with a a 60% markup on this, I'm 108 pounds for a 4.7 milligramme implant, and that will last up to 4 years.

So I'm just gonna leave that little thought, thought I'll get with you. So the timing of the implant's quite important and I recommend implanting in November. And I implant in November because that's when they're in a stress so they don't get the hormonal surge.

But if you implant them in between January and March, you get a a surge which can bring them into season. It will last for 2 weeks. Do nothing, it'll be fine.

They'll come back out feet, but you need to warn the owners that she will be fertile. So if she gets mated by a hob, even though she's implanted, she will get pregnant, she will carry the pregnancy, she will give birth, and she's more likely to miss mother. Because of it, and that's one of my ferrets.

I was doing a pregnancy ultrasound scan on and I just smeared, some unsweetened peanut butter on her thorax, and she was licking rap, so she wasn't bothered with the fact I was in ultrasounding her abdomen. That's quite a cool technique to use for any ferret that you want to ultrasound. So what do I advise?

OK, I've got 10 minutes left, guys, so I want to give you a chance to ask questions, so I'll I'll try to speed up. So what do I advise? Well, it depends on what you're, they're keeping the ferrets for.

If they're workers, then. The value of the ferret to the owner isn't always the same as what the pet ferret's like. This is actually my husband, that's Sirius when he was a kid.

Sirius is now 7 years of age. My and my husband didn't want me to get another ferret, but as you can see by the cheesy grin, he was quite happy when Sirius came along, and that's the first night I had him. But the pet ferret, the human animal bonds stronger, OK, because it's they're, they're there to be as a companion.

And yes, some people were working ferrets, they also consider them as pets as well. But it depends on what are they wanting the animal for. Working ferrets are more likely to be kept outdoors, therefore, they're more likely to want to either make them or vasectomise them cos they don't mind them being mated, they just want the, they, they don't want it at the expense of having to bring each gill out of season using a drug.

What do I do with my own ferrets? And that's sometimes how I explain to owners. Well, I implant the ferrets, I don't plan to breed.

I have a few rescues, this is a ferret with endometriosis, and I had to surgically spa one of my ferrets that came with a, a tumour in her uterus which thankfully turned out to be benign. I gel jab my my gels that I want to breed but I haven't wanted a litter that particular year. Cause I do breed regularly and this is one of my junior vets, this is mini me I call it me, with a litter of my ferret kits that I brought them in when they were about 6 weeks old, and, and she was just in 7 sitting playing with them.

But I'm going to vasectomize one of my breeding hobs this year to, assist with bringing them out of heat. But what if the owner really just wants the surgery, OK? Don't hit the second one and get stressed about it, guys.

I used to when I was when I was really younger, I used to get really angry and really stressed about things, and internalise that a lot, whereas now I, I'm just like, right, OK, I've given you all the information. You've made an educated decision. If you go against medical advice, cos currently my advice is do not surgically utter unless there's a medical reason to do so.

You should implant or vasectomies or joe jab. I still surgically neuter, but they sign a disclaimer form. They just sign a form that tells them that says that they understand to get medical advice and they take all financial, moral and legal responsibilities should their ferret develop clinical signs associated with adrenal gland disease.

OK. And is there a place for compromise? Well, I don't think we've got the whole picture yet.

I think there will be other factors come into play as time goes on with adrenal gland disease. So one of the, the things that I've discussed with some owners is that, well, you can implant them and then if the implant wears off when they're about 4 years of age, if you don't want to implant again, if you want to surgically neutral at that point, OK, because the chances are your ferret will die of something else before it gets clinical signs associated with adrenal gland disease. So I have had that conversation because owners have asked my opinion.

Do you think that's a worthwhile compromise? Well, at this moment I don't have any enough data or or information to argue that it's not. So I, I, and I'll tell them that they still have to sign the disclaimer form, but you know, I, I, I work with them.

So I want to talk about hyper hyper estrogenism because it is a really important condition and it causes bone marrow suppression. And how long's too long? OK, that's a question I asked by vet's a lot, how long's too long?

Well, we know that if they're, they're in heat for 4 weeks or longer. They've got a dramatically higher risk of developing hydrationism, OK, and at least 50% of gels will get affected, if not more, and 40% of affected gels will die. OK, so that's, that, that, that's a lot of gels.

And the clinical signs, this is a gel with, with hyperhesionism. She's lost her coat because of it. She's lost body condition.

Her her valve was swollen because she's in heat. She was weak, they go off their food, they get weight loss, they get pale mous membranes because of anaemia. They can also get tication and ecchymosis because they lose their thrombocytes as well.

And some of them actually died due to blood loss, . And because the news peanut and thank you to Doctor Connor Creighton, for this picture of the pus coming out of the the vulva, this ferret, you can also see she's lost her coat she's been here a long time. Makes pymeters much more common, and yes, in the ideal world we would be judging our antibiotics and cultural sensitivity, but while we're waiting on them, a good first line is moxielav and I use 25 mgs for count twice daily in ferrets.

Bear in mind that ferrets really actually are easier to tablet than you give liquids to, and liquids amoxiclave tastes disgusting, so they'll foam at the mouth and refuse to take it. Check for millennia as well because they're prone to gastric ulceration with stress. So we want to make sure we're not losing blood that way.

And to diagnose it, it's, it's clinical signs and a blood sample guys. And yeah, I'm scruffing this animal in this picture, and we are trying to move away from doing that because we know that it induces stress in in ferrets. This animal was conscious.

It didn't yawn at all, which is a sign of stress and I know in ferrets, and it's just regularling a little bit, but we, what we do know is if you anaesthetize a ferret, you alter its blood parameters, which includes its red blood cell count goes down. OK, so I always try to get this sample conscious and I use the cephalic. That's the cephalic there, OK, it's quite a big vein and I use a 22 gauge catheter.

And for people that that aren't believing me, there's me putting it in the same ferret. And you can see it's the same ferret because my nurse is naughtily wearing her nail varnish. And put the catheter in and I ripped it out the catheter which yes I know is is a bit naughty as well, but I, I want a PCE and I want to quickly, OK, with the minimum length of trauma to this animal because we could have a thrombocytopenia.

So I don't want to do multiple sticks if I can help it. And the prognosis you can base on your PCD. Now bear in mind the normal ferret PCD is higher than dogs, it's 46 to 61%.

Some literature will quote lower than that, but I think that was due to being an esterized ferris, and it's before we realised that the, the PCV drops in anaesthetized ferrets. So if the PCV is over 25, the gel's gonna be fine. 15 to 25%, she's got a fair chance, below 15's grave and below 10's fatal.

OK. So treatment, we need to bring the gel out season. Don't use Sulo and implant guys, bear in mind it will, the initial hormonal surge will keep her in heat for another two weeks, OK?

So we want to get her out of season. I use delvesterone to get them out of season. The reason I don't use a vasectomized ho, and I put that in because my husband asked me this question last night, and it's because aggressing's mating, ferret mating is aggressive and the whole drags it about and then can potentially injure and if you can't clot your blood, then that's, that can be like that's life threatening, OK?

If the PCV is over 25%, all you do is gijabber she'll be fine, and chances are, as long as it's above 20%, that's all you need to do, as well as long as she's still eating. If the PCV is less than 20%, a blood transfusion is likely required. Good news is they don't have blood groups.

You can use hobs, quite good as blood donors, I would anaesthetize the take the blood because you're taking 0.8% of the body weight. And they recommend mixing it six part bloods to one part sodium citrate, OK, and then giving it slow IV, to the recipient.

You're probably gonna have to assist feed these animals, so Emirates Carnivore Care or Obo Carnival Care or AD syringe feed, they quite like it. I give them famotidine, 2.5 mgs to kick once daily to help with gastric ulceration, and Pepto-Bismol because they've all got Helicobacter and it's been proven to help preventing it, exacerbating any gastric ulceration, and 17.5 mg per kg works out at 1 mL per kilogramme, and they quite like the cherry flavoured one.

If the PCV is less than 15%, I consider putting them to sleep, because chances are you're not, you're gonna put them through a lot and you're not gonna get them back. And if it's less than 10%, I recommend putting them to sleep. And I always tell owners prevention is better than cure.

So thank you for listening guys. I know I've sped through that last few slides. I, I believe this will be available for you to listen to it again, and I'm happy to take any questions.

I hope these are all still awake. Thank you, Madonna for your fantastic presentation. We have a question from Anna.

It says, I want to set up a ji jab day in day this spring as the Delvester and it's only line lines sets for 24 hours. I am wondering how long can a deal be safely left in season to maximise the number of deals we can take out of season. Also, do you have an idea of a good date suggestion?

I was thinking mid-April, or is that too late? Right, it depends where you are in the world and where you are in the if you're in the UK where a little bit of where you are in the UK. So gills can be in season 3 weeks.

I don't, I do not worry about a gel in the season for 3 weeks, OK, so if you're planning a gill jab day, then about 3 weeks. It varies depending what part of the country you're at as to what your light quality is like as to how soon they come into heat. So I would say for me, where I live, I'm in North Lanarkshire in Scotland, I would recommend ill jab days to either be the end of February, beginning of March because the vast majority of ferrets will have been, will be in heat by that point, and they'll either be they just come in here or they'll already be in heat to 3 days.

If you know in your area that actually the gels don't come into heat till a little bit later. And at the beginning of April that you know from the gills in your area and they talking to your ferret owners or having a sneaky peek on the forums that by the beginning of April they have a case, it's a case of, yeah, that's fine. At the beginning of April, most of the girls in your area will be in season and they shouldn't have been in season any longer than 3 weeks, go for it.

I do know of clinics where owners have bought that have multiple ferrets, buy the whole bottle of Delvesterone, signing off the licence form, and they're told it might not be as effective, and they, they use that bottle of Delvesterone off licence, and what I mean by that is they use it from over the 24 hour period. OK, I do know that happens, and certainly from what I've been told, it hasn't caused an issue. And as years gone by when I first graduated, I didn't know about the, the, the single use and we all had deal on our shelves that been open for longer than 24 hours.

I'm not saying we should be doing it because that's not right, it's against, it's against the licence. We all did it. Because we didn't, we didn't know.

If that makes sense. Yeah, thank you very much. I don't know if anyone else has a question.

If not, thank you so much for joining and thank you again, Madonna for this fantastic webinar. See you soon in another webinar. Bye.

OK, thanks, bye. Thanks, guys.