socializing degus

I originally had one male (Bram) and one female (Flora) degu. Most commercial pet stores around here have either all male or all female stock of any given rodent, but not so for small shops. I really should have checked, but I didn’t know how to sex a degu then. After I got them home, I realized my folly and set about finding companions for them so I could split them up and put them in separate cages where they’d both have friends to socialize with.

I found a pet store that had another female and two males, so I brought those home. They were so small that they could squeeze through the bars of the ferret nation cage that my other two were in, so I ended up putting them in an older and smaller ferret cage while I waited for them to grow. Meanwhile I didn’t split up my existing male and female and I ended up with a litter of six more degus, three male and three female. This brought my total degus up to 11.

The previous little ones (Fauna, Romeo, and Diego) were finally big enough for the larger cage, so I moved them into the Ferret nation cage with the boys on top and the one lady temporarily on the bottom. I also moved a bunny in there for her to socialize with. It was pretty amusing to watch her climb up onto the back of the bunny when they’d go to sleep.

Anyway, I had to separate Bram from the boys because they weren’t mixing very well now that the little ones were no longer babies. They got along great when they were too small for the larger cage. I ended up putting all of the babies along with their mother (Flora) in the same cage with Fauna. They got along well without any trickery.

To get the males happy was trickier. I had them bathe (in their sandy dirt bath) with a few drops of Lavender oil. This was both the newer two males (Romeo and Diego) and the older male (Bram). It took about two days. My first attempt I didn’t do the bath thing and just put them in together and they were uncooperative. The next attempt featured the bath and they briefly did some posturing nonsense, but within a few hours they were snuggled up and snoozing together. Keep in mind, these are males that all got along great while Romeo and Diego were still juveniles.

Rather than buy a second large ferret nation cage, I’m waiting for some building supplies to arrive so I can put together a new cage for the females. But meanwhile, I have to get the males out of there. I moved them to a fish tank and put that fish tank in the ferret nation cage. I repeated the Lavendar bath approach, but the little were still getting chased around by Bram. It’s now day two, and the young lads were snuggled up with Romeo, but Bram is still occasionally getting uppity and chasing them around. It’s not gong too badly, though. Aside form the chasing, when they have caught up with each other they do a sort of silent slap fight for a little while, and then they run again.

I have not named the additional three males or three females. And the three males can squeeze their way out of the large cage, so I’m going to have to make some modifications. When they do squeeze their way out of the cage and go exploring, they don’t mind so much when I pick them up. I’ve made it a habit to feed them all by hand. Sometimes I make them climb into one hand to reach the food that’s in the other. The end result is that most of the degus don’t mind being picked up.

Time to think of some new names.

Tags: degu, journal, index

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