💾 Archived View for thatit.be › 2024-10-27-08-59-25.gmi captured on 2024-12-17 at 10:03:57. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
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I haven’t come up with good names for my degus yet. I’m pretty sure I have three males and two females. The youngest are still too small for the larger cage, so they remain separated by size instead of sex. I was going to get some lexan to put in the large cage so I could move them in early, but it turns out sheets of lexan are really expensive. It would have been over $200 to line the larger cage with it. So they will stay in my smaller ferret cage for now.
I’ve learned they should only be fed once or twice a day. I was going to leave them with constant access to food, but apparently it’s common for them to over eat like that. Like my ferrets, it sounds like degus are genetically predisposed to diabetes. This is somewhat troublesome given their all-plant diet. They eat massive amounts of carbohydrates, so even if I avoid giving them sugary seeds, they’re still at risk of developing health issues. I mostly give them hay and a pre-made pellet that’s really just compacted hay.
I’ve been regularly reaching into their cages to get them used to being poked and prodded and picked up. I spent a while playing fetch with the larger male. I don’t know why I called it fetch: He would climb onto my hand and I’d place him at the highest point in his cage. Then he’d run as fast as he could back down to the spot where I had picked him up so he could climb back onto my hands and do it again.
The larger female is more nervous about being picked up. She’ll climb on my hands, but she doesn’t really climb into them like the male does.
The smaller degu will all climb up onto my hands out of curiosity. One of the little males will go to sleep on my hands, the other male will climb up my arms and try to chew on my sleeves. The tiny female is more nervous, she will sniff curiously and boop my fingers with her tiny mouth, but she’s too interested in other things to spend much time near my hands.
The sounds they make are quite amusing. I had heard them in videos while researching them before buying them, but they didn’t make these noises in the pet store. It was really after I had them home that they started to make their little sounds. They sound like baby chicks for the most part. With some chipmunk and squeeky toy thrown in for good measure.
The younger ones spend a lot of time climbing the smaller cage. I went out and trimmed some branches from an apple tree. For the larger two in the larger cage I put these in a stack and put their hay in the middle of it. The degu have carried them off to different parts of the cage. For the younger ones I put these into a plastic container in the center of their cage. There’s a small hole in the container, and so they alternate between chewing the sticks in place and trying to pull them out of the container. I’ve also put some of these twigs on the top of the cage, they’ve already climbed up to retrieve some of them.
I’ve been fairly vigilant to make sure they don’t spend time chewing on anything plastic. For the older two, this means I had to pull out their bath house. For the younger ones I’ve mostly just been watching to make sure they don’t start chewing on the container I put in their cage.
I’ve built a few small structures out of untreated wood and one with some particle board. They haven’t tried to eat the particle board, just the rough wood and sticks and such I’ve put in their cages.
created: 2024-10-27
(re)generated: 2024-12-17