Hey! Our regular ferret food got discontinued and we got a different kind with similar nutrition. Both brands were thoroughly researched nutrition/ingredients wise. I don't feed crap to ferrets. My 6.5 year old male ferret is an extremely picky eater and, as expected, hated new food. I left one bowl with new food mixed with old and 1 bowl of old food in the cage. I haven't seen him eat in the last couple of days, usually he runs to the bowl every day at the cage cleaning/food changing time. Though, I don't normally monitor his eating. The bowl is always full, he and his sister eat whenever they are hungry. Today i noticed that he appears pretty weak when he walks. To feed him I crushed his old food with a hint of peanut butter and water and he licked couple of tablespoons. He slept mainly all day. I am planning on spoon feeding him tonight, but i am off to work tomorrow. Is the smell of new food being in a cage enough to turn him off his old food? I don't understand what is happening. He just had a vet check up and appeared healthy, except for a potential early signs of adrenal disease (he has rat tail). Vet said not to worry about adrenal, until he starts loosing fur on his body and violently scratching. He isn't scratching too much and still has all his body fur. Other than that he has always been perfectly healthy. Just a very picky eater. He actually gags if he smells food he doesn't like. Can new food can be so disgusting to him that he will starve himself?

Can you get some chicken baby food? Water it down a little and give it to him with a syringe. You can also moisten kibble and put it in a blender and make it the consistency that will go through a syringe. Also make sure he gets plenty of water. Don't want him to get dehydrated. And yes they can starve themselves because they are picky about food. I had one try to do that. You could try making soupy with the two foods mixed. That way he would get the taste of the new. Ferrets imprint on food and sometimes it's hard to get them to switch. A lot of people do a mix so if one becomes unavailable they will still eat the other. I wouldn't do anymore peanut butteer. It's not good for them. Hope this helps.

Weakness can either be from lack of food or low Blood Glucose levels. Lack of food can cause the BG to be low. He needs to eat. They can go down so quickly. I would get him checked by your vet.

 
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Thank you so much for your advice~! Strangely my huge grocery store was out of chicken baby food, so instead I got a little bit of marshall's duk soup into my fuzzy. He hated it, and even his all-eating sister hated it when she walked by to check up on us. He seems to be perking up. We hand fed him a little bit of his favorite dry food last night and today he ate on his own, then splashed in the water dish, and tried to climb in the bathtub. He is still pretty weak, but perking up. Maybe that new food did not agree with his stomach and made him nauseated or something. I am going to monitor him and hopefully he will regain his strength soon. I was ready to phone vet this morning, but hopefully there will be no need to. Thanks again for your advice!

If you still  have his old food, mix a little new into it and gradually increase the proportion of new to old.  If you have enough you can mix some together in a separate container so they start to swap smells while you are mixing smaller amounts in the bowl.

Once you get him on the new food, give it a couple weeks and start mixing in another food in case this happens again.  We feed a mix of at least 3 kibbles.

Did his food get discontinued by the manufacturer or just the store where you bought it?  

As for adrenal, you could look into getting him a Suprelorin F implant.  
http://www.virbacferretsusa.com/about-suprelorinf-implant
It may stop possible adrenal from becoming real adrenal.  It's a hormone implant and may take 4 weeks to become effective.  You sure wouldn't want him violently scratching that long. It could just be our luck but every ferret we've had that had rat tail eventually got full-on adrenal.

THE DOOKS OF HAZARD

How's your baby doing?

 
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