How big do ferrets get?
How much do ferrets weigh? Is my ferret underweight or overweight?
by ferretpapa
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The shelter management software I made for the GCFA allows us to pull some cool statistics like this! The average female ferret at the GCFA weighs 0.76 kg (1 lb 10.8 oz) and the average male weighs 1.07 kg (2 lb 5.7 oz). Males are 40% heavier on average. Over 99% of these ferrets are Marshall ferrets.
Note: being above or below average doesn't mean anything is wrong with your ferret. There's a wide range of healthy weights for both sexes. Trends are more important than the actual weight.
Weighing your ferrets regularly with a kitchen scale is one of the best ways to monitor their health, especially if you suspect illness. If you have multiple ferrets and one of them has bad poop, it can be hard to identify which ferret it is. Weighing them daily will usually answer that question.
You can always use my poop tracker as well - I'm working on building in some charts and trends so that you can see statistics on your own ferrets!
This is the average across all ages, including underweight and overweight ferrets. Each weight recorded counts as a sample - some ferrets were only weighed once while others were weighed >20 times. But even accounting for that, if we look at the average of each ferret's average weight, it's not much different (.77 and 1.08 kg for females and males respectively).
Interestingly, when I ran the average for each month, there was not a noticeable difference over time. I expected it to drop during the summer months but it stayed consistent.
My theory is that their biological clock thinks that they're born in the spring, but since Marshall breeds year-round, their "winter" weight probably comes 6-8 months after their birthday. Gideon and Maxine (2 of my only ferrets that I had birth certificates for) were born in late fall and would get their winter weight in the middle of the summer every year. I called that "reverse cycling" but "offset cycling" would probably be more accurate.
Most of the ferrets at the GCFA get adopted within a few months, so we usually don't get a chance to compare summer and winter weights. Of the few ferrets we've had for >6 months, they seem to lose about 20% of their peak weight during their "summer" season. Among my own ferrets, I've seen much larger drops up to 40% of their body weight from winter to summer.
How do your ferrets compare?
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