mixed sexes group

[willyfrancis]

Good morning, I know that mixed groups are not an option because male can fight for female. But I'm curious to know if there is any mixed group (naturally neutered!). I know about a mixed group of 7 male with a sterilized female and they live peacefully, I don't know if this is a really anomal.

[moletteuk]

I think it has cropped up before on the forum once or twice that people have kept more than one neutered male with a female or females. I think the issue is that fighting can break out at any time out of the blue in any group of degus and by keeping them in this arrangement you are increasing the chances of that happening. I wonder if the sterilisation of the female is having an effect in the case you know of - if she doesn't come into heat that my prevent fighting. I wonder what sterilisation procedure the female has undergone?

[bouncy]

I guess, if there's a more even ratio of male to female, it should be less of a problem because there'll be "enough to go around". Having said that, I've deliberately only kept males.......

Btw, nice mountain!

[teemu]

A spayed female degu would not go into heat any more. My understanding is that this is how sterilisation is done for degus (and most animals, really), since the alternatives would be very hard to perform on such a small animal. So it's possible that that might curb the worst of the fighting since the males would not have as many reasons to get worked up. But it still seems like it could easily cause a lot of fighting because of simply wanting to be the dominant male of the group.

Though I guess that degus do live in mixed colonies in the wild, of up to ten individuals, and my understanding is that they do not have an arrangement where only the alpha male breeds. But of course it is very hard to give them totally natural conditions anyway, and probably any feuding in the pack will be much more pronounced in pets (due to less space, no competition from other packs giving another outlet for any of this, and so on).