Male and female are thriving, but no babies?

[plecto]

Hi. I've had two degus for about 5 months now, but the female doesnt get pregnant. I have seen them mating one time, but the male have been flirting with her several times, but she often seems kind of grumpy. I am thinking that one of them is impotent which is kind of sad since it was babies I wanted. I am now thinking of buying another female degu to see if I'm more lucky with that one, but how do you think this is going to work? I am thinking another female beacuse I guess the chances of a male beeing impotent is far less than a female beeing it, and two females and a male shoud work fine, right? The female I have noe is really passiv, beeing bossed around by the male, never getting to feed and never arguing with the male. The male is opposite beeing really bossy, fighting he's way out of the cage even biting me if he doesnt get what he wants. The male reached adulthood (I'm thinking size) a couple of months ago. I'm not sure how old the female is, but she was a adult when I got her, maybe she is a year old or so.

So I guess I have two questions. Can I be sure that one of them is impotent (in that case who?), or shoud I wait longer before buying a new degu? The other is, how do you think my degus would welcome a new female in the cage?

[deguconvert]

I have heard of people having a male and female together for at least a couple of years and there were no babies. Then a day came that they found themselves in a position of needing to rehome their degus. The next owner took them home knowing their history and fully expecting that they would not have babies. About 4 months later, they woke up to find babies!! So . . . is it that the change in environment was what was needed? Was there a change in food? I don't know, but even though these two degus seemed "impotent" they clearly were not. Perhaps your degus need a change of some kind? Larger cage? Different food? Different location in your house? All of the above? Give them some all a try maybe.

One thing I would encourage you to do is to work on hand training your male. He sounds like it would do him some good to be tamed a bit, and it would make it much easier for you to work with him. Do some reading through the different threads that are found on the Introductions and Training Board if you would like some tips on what to do.