Chinchilla Community Forums

1

Health / breathing hard

« on: May 29, 2015, 06:05:13 PM »

I think I started this on the other computer and got interrupted so try again.

Sakura has been less active lately. She's spent several months with a male and is a big round fluffy ball of a chinchilla so we thought it was just pregnancy. I was watching her sitting partially upright and she breathed in so hard her feet would push apart with each breath. I listened to her and there was a whoosh sound when breathing but no clicking or anything besides sounding like a large amount of regular air. I wasn't sure normal chinchilla breathing but Aime you can't even really hear with just your ear against her. Sakura has been otherwise normal. Eating, drinking, normal stool, taking treats, interacting with the male, her eyes are clear and alert, her coat is clean and fluffy... She's just spending more time sitting in this one corner and she's slower to come to the bars. How concerning is it?

2

General Breeder Chat / lost a viable kit for the first time

« on: March 01, 2015, 02:55:25 PM »

We lost one runt before but this time I'm not sure what happened. She was gaining 4 grams a day, active, starting to eat solid food and then she was dead next to the pellet bowl. It wasn't one of the cages with lots of levels and obstacles. One low shelf and one house. She didn't get any treats. She had no wounds, didn't look to have been crushed, mouth was clear, teeth were fine, butt was clean and there had been no sign of digestive upset...

I'm not sure if there's really anything to learn here. It doesn't look like a husbandry issue and I wasn't planning to breed that female again anyway. It's just sad.

3

Other Pets / guinea pig pups

« on: March 01, 2015, 02:32:58 AM »

I picked up a group of guinea pigs nearly 2 months back. Supposed to be 4 sows with 2 *female* younger ones. 1 of those turned out to be male. Guinea pigs can possibly breed as young as 3 weeks so at 8weeks and being kept with the females everyone is likely pregnant.

Iroiro just had these

The broken red I haven't named is looking quite round. Kuro is not though. Maybe she actually didn't get pregnant.
The rest of the herd

4

Health / fur chewing extreme

« on: February 11, 2015, 12:40:19 AM »

I have asked a couple breeders about it but they had no more ideas. There probably aren't anymore ideas. Hachiro had a litter over a year ago of triplets. She got irritated from the triplets constantly trying to use the same nipple and started chewing at the irritation. We got her a cream for the irritated skin and separated her from the babies periodically until she healed. Her fur was growing back but as soon as it was nearly back to normal she chewed it all up and looked raggedy again. We could find no health problem. She improved a little but then started getting steadily worse.

We gave her as much cage space as possible and we are not ones to use small breeding run cages. Right now we are working on putting 4 cn together in a rectangle for a pair. We got lots of stuff to chew on. Entire limbs off local trees we know are safe. We trimmed several feet of grapevines and gave that to the chins. We took a wooden pet bird indoor nesting box (very thin pine sheets with nontoxic glue) and stuffed it full of various hays so she ate the hay while chewing the box. Destruction and mayhem ensued but the fur chewing did not improve. We gave her a permanent personal dust bath so she could keep her fur as clean as she wants. Finally totally out of ideas we put her with another chin. Utter disaster. Now I have 2 ragged looking chins.

What else is there to try? Every month it gets worse. The only thing I can think of is to get her out of the cage more but while we try to handle our chins a lot we do have a fair number since we are breeding so out of cage time is a little limited for some. If we did not have a foster dog I would release her in to the spare bedroom for long periods of time but it's occupied right now. The other bedroom is kept at 80F for the hedgehogs and the rest of the rooms have too many hazards for out of cage pets except dogs. I would like to rehome her to a good pet home where they can let her out frequently. Preferably multiple times a day. I am afraid though that they might give up on her fur chewing and leave her to tear herself in to baldness rather than keeping after it and doing what is necessary whichever way things go.

This is how she was in aug

That was really mild chewing. She has giant chunks near completely gone now. She looks so scrawny from the lack of fur. We will take her to the vet another time just to be sure it's not a physical problem but one hasn't been found previously. Maybe the new vet office will have someone knowledgeable that wants to take her home and work on the problem.

5

General Breeder Chat / a little tov white

« on: January 30, 2015, 04:46:10 PM »

Checking cages yesterday and we wondered why Katsu came flying at the door. Then my husband saw movement. His mate had a kit early. With Katsu hurling insults at my husband we got his new daughter out and weighed her at 40grams. Nice healthy kit and she sure can run away from the camera.

No chinchillas here

6

New Births / Inada kits

« on: October 07, 2014, 12:21:47 PM »

I thought Aime would have her second litter first but in the past 2 weeks Inada ballooned up. I found her hunched weird about an hour ago and there's a wet kit under her. She looked far too big for that one kit so I expect more. I wish xrays were a little more routine and cheaper for chinchilla pregnancies like they are in the UK. The UK vets I was talking with do chinchilla pregnancy xrays all the time.

Luckily I found my camera unharmed in the husky puppy's favorite spot for chewing random objects.

7

Other Pets / husky puppy

« on: September 25, 2014, 12:04:35 PM »

This is Nijiro (rainbow).

Her dam dried up when they were 5 weeks and Niji was a runt so she did very poorly when they decided to just feed large puppy kibble without softening and no supplements. She was 3 lbs when we brought her home. On premade ground raw patties and goat milk she caught back up fast and is now doing fine at 11 lbs on kibble with smaller pieces. She thinks chinchillas are fluffy tailed puppies who should play with her. The chins are not impressed and go about their day ignoring the bouncy puppy in the room. My more nervous ones are in the basement away from seeing her.

8

General Chat / new chins

« on: September 25, 2014, 09:38:30 AM »

I husband really wanted a sapphire and Katsu's breeder wanted to get into hedgehogs. We traded 2 for 2 and also got a violet. I think I like the violet color better. It's more interesting.

Sumi the violet female

And the sapphire male hasn't been named yet

9

General Chat / found good wheels for CN cages

« on: August 22, 2014, 09:58:32 AM »

I found these flying saucer like wheels that sit on a base instead of attaching to the bars and breaking the flimsy critter nations. They might take up more room. I'm not sure since I don't have the regular flying saucers. The base is quite solid and the wheel is silent. I wasn't even sure they'd figured it out because I heard nothing. Then we saw Aime jogging on it followed by Katsu. With 2 chins running on it the wheel hasn't shifted an inch in 24hours. Maybe it might when they get to running faster but I don't think it will be a big deal.

http://www.exoticnutrition.com/trwhla14in.html

10

General Chat / new beige female

« on: June 22, 2014, 08:53:57 PM »

I was going to keep the hetero beige male to breed to my hetero beige females to make homo beige offspring but he turned out to be rather insane. The person who bought Aika's pair of kits took him to try to settle down for a pet. So today I skipped a step and picked up a homo beige female. Don't know a whole lot about her. They met us in the parking lot, stuck a beige chinchilla in our carrier, and handed us a pedigree with hardly a word. The woman turned around and walked off in the middle of the conversation.

Aside from an extra tail curl which is a show fault she seems like a nice chinchilla. Except I got nipped for petting her in the car while my hand blocked her escape route out of the carrier. She was not happy to be stuck for the 2hr car ride and was not interested in my attempts to distract her. Didn't get any info about her food or anything. I just gave her a bit of oxbow, a timothy cube, and some apple twigs for tonight.

She refused to step on the fleece at first. She seems used to bedding she can dig in cause she kept trying to dig the carrier and then she wouldn't get off my arm on to the fleece. She bounced cautiously a few steps at a time with stiff legs until she decided you can walk on fleece. It does not gobble up chinchillas

11

General Chat / can't get through to this chin

« on: June 12, 2014, 02:21:34 PM »

I've had shy chinchillas before but some treats and careful petting usually has them improving within a couple months. This male is just not responding. He started out nervous and a bit spastic. At first he would come up to sniff me when the cage door was opened. Then he started flying around his cage when you opened the door and often accidentally fly out past you. Sometimes he takes treats and sometimes he just starts running in circles around his cage. Occasionally after a couple circles he hides in his pvc tube. Every wood house I give him he flips so he mostly uses the pvc pipe and he likes to burrow under the fleece liner.

We've had him 6 months and he's not getting better. He's getting much worse. Today when I tried to get him out for exercise and dust bathing I thought I was going to get bit. I was a little reluctant when I first got chins and they complained at me but I've never really felt they were truly going to hurt me. This one makes me fear for my fingers. He's becoming violent. When I get near the cage he stands on his hindlegs and yells at me while threatening to spray urine.

I don't really have any ideas left for calming him down. I've been bribing him with sticks, rose petals, and bit of cereal with no luck. I've started looking for a new home for him because he's clearly not happy here. Maybe someone with more time to work with him and less animals around will make progress. Of course I'm disclosing his behavior problems and I'm not asking any money for him. I was told by his owner and friends of the owner that he was quite tame and friendly.

12

General Chat / Aime decided I need a bath

« on: June 09, 2014, 08:43:39 PM »

Babies are weaning, adolescents are going to new homes and it's musical cages time again. I put Aime and Katsu in the bathroom with the big dust bath and sat down to watch them. Aime seems to have decided I needed involved in the dusting. She rolled, ran over to me, climbed up and even insisted I lift her to my shoulder, shook, slid down my chest, rolled, bounced across my lap, rolled, asked to be picked up.... She really didn't care about Katsu. She was too busy coating me in blue cloud. I tried to brush it all off but I keep ending up with dust in my mouth.

My french fries were a bit gritty. I finally just took a shower. Glad I didn't get the sparkly version.

13

General Chat / looking for bamboo

« on: June 06, 2014, 10:52:37 PM »

Anyone know where I can get solid chunks of bamboo? I've been looking on bird toy making sites but can only find hollowed pieces. The chinchillas took apart a bamboo and coconut bird toy months ago and Aika has been bringing the last rapidly shrinking chunk up to the bars. She just stares at me with it in her mouth. I think she wants another piece. Chinchillas communicate better than my dogs.

14

General Chat / interesting perch

« on: May 05, 2014, 09:39:20 AM »

I was looking for a calcium and trace mineral supplement for chins with no to low salt. All small mammal blocks are majority salt. I found one site that sells little bird mineral blocks for chins. Birds are as sensitive to salt and sugar as chins so I went hunting through bird mineral supplements. I found these clam shell perches and ordered 2 to see how they liked them.
http://www.drsfostersmith.com/product/prod_display.cfm?c=5059+8929+23376&pcatid=23376

It's a big hit. They haven't chewed on them a lot but they love to perch on them and sleep on them.

I also got a few of these but off amazon
http://www.drsfostersmith.com/product/prod_display.cfm?c=5059+8929+18004&pcatid=18004

They scrape at them some. Especially the pregnant females and growing adolescents.

15

New Births / Aime is giving birth!

« on: April 16, 2014, 11:12:34 AM »

1 black velvet drying so far. Cross your fingers for a brown velvet and that everything continues to go well. Of course pics will follow after they dry and fluff up.