What Should I Feed My Sick Or Elderly Ferret? Duck Soup!

When ferrets get sick, they might not want to go to all the work of eating their kibble or ripping meat apart. Older ferrets might have bad teeth and kibble might hurt too much to eat. So, feed them duck soup.

What is duck soup?

Firstly, duck soup doesn’t usually have duck in it. As the story goes, a ferret named Lucky Ducky was sick and his humans fed him “soup” while he got better. Since then, any supplemental mushy food is called duck soup.

When should you feed your ferret duck soup?

It’s okay to give most kinds of duck soup to your ferret as a treat. It’s even a good idea to give him some when he is healthy, so he gets used to it and doesn’t mind it when he actually needs it.

Additionally, you should feed this concoction to your fuzzy when he’s sick and has stopped eating or if he’s old and won’t eat enough.

Where do you get duck soup?

You can buy something at the pet store called duck soup. I’ve never tried. it. Most people I know make their own soup for their fuzzies. Most people seem to have their own recipes. Here are some of them.

Chicken baby food

Gerber chicken baby food is easy to digest and a decent food for a fuzzy. Most ferrets will lick it on up without too much coaxing. Chicken baby food has the advantage that it comes in little jars, so not a whole lot will go bad at once. Once you open the jar, however, you need to refrigerate it.

The kibble variety

Put your ferret’s kibble in a coffee grinder (or blender) and pulverize it. Put your kibble powder in a tightly sealed container. When its time to fed your weasel, put a little bit of kibble in a bowl and add enough water to hydrate it. You can even microwave it for a few seconds if you want. The advantages to this kind of duck soup are that you’re not changing food on your ferret, and you can make as small a quantity as you need without waste. I use this form of duck soup when I travel with a sick ferret because it’s nice and portable.

The sweet kind

If you’re ferret is having trouble with the desire to eat, this might be the way to go. You take 1 jar of chicken baby food and 1 container of Ensure. Put it in a tightly sealed container and shake the mixture. This mixture is sweet and almost any ferret will love to eat it. The disadvantages to this soup are that the mixture does have a fair amount of sugar in it from the Ensure, and the mixture won’t last more than a couple of days.

A more traditional soup

Take a chicken. Stick it in a giant pot with water. Boil for a long time. Eventually the skin and meat will fall off the bones. Turn off the heat. Pick the bones out of the mixture. Get a stick blender and blend the mixture. (You can put this stuff in a blender, but every time I’ve tried that, I’ve ended up with boiling soup on my face. It hurts. Stick blenders are good.) Once the mixture is mixed, pour it into ice-cube trays and freeze. When you need to feed your fuzzy, take out one cube and microwave it. Mix it and feed your ferret.

Other things you might consider adding to the soup before you freeze it are olive oil or a little bit of ground kibble.

As I said before, there are tons of recipes available for duck soup. If one doesn’t work, try another.