Intros - Tau and Sonar - COMPLICATIONS! HELP!

[wiserabbit]

I posted a couple of days back about introducing older males to each other, but now we have an additional complication.

Our two new males, Tau and Sonar don't seem to be as bonded as we were led to believe when we rescued them. After breaking up a minor scrap between these two I picked Tau up for a cuddle as he is super timid and I planned to use some sunflower seed bribery. It gave me the first chance to have a proper look at him.

These two were originally a group of three, but P@H removed one of the group due to "excess aggression". Now I've had a proper look at Tau I can see he is absolutely covered with injuries, in various states of healing. His back is a total mess, with patches of fur growing back, old scabs, bald bits and one fresh-ish open wound. He has a nasty bite on his paw that we spotted the night after we got him. His ears are raggedy as well, though again they are healed old wounds. No wonder he is so timid!

It's worth noting that Sonar is uninjured bar a scab on his chin - it worries me that he may be the aggressive one.

Now they are mostly peaceful with each other, but sometimes nasty scraps occur. Tau still makes the little chirtling noises to Sonar that we see in our bonded group.

Given that the fights aren't constant I'm not sure what to do. We have a spare cage - should I be taking Tau out completely and giving him time to heal and regain his condition before putting him back in? That could mean I would have two intros rather than just one to deal with later or worse, could end up with two lone goos if we fail on both intros.

In terms of his wounds, we are going to treat with wound powder today. As soon as we got them we booked them in with our vet (who is an exotics vet) for a health check, which is tomorrow.

[wiserabbit]

OR, should it be Sonar that I remove into a spare cage, seeing as he is the one showing all the agression and try and intro Tau, once healed, to my group and leaving Sonar separate?

[sazjc123]

I am fairly new to degus however have done lots of research on them, reading peoples experiences ect.

Maybe the two that you were led to believe had bonded so well should be re-introduced. I have read alot about separating after fights so maybe if you put the cages next to each other and then have them out in the bath together they may become friends again, once thats done move on to the next step of introducing with your others?

Hope you get this solved.
Sarah

[deguconvert]

This sounds a lot like what was happening in our home over three years back. Brief history to help . . . bought two goos, brothers, but six weeks into owning them, one died by drowning in a toilet we didn't know was open while he was out for a visit. Same day we bought two brothers to become the new cage mates for our newly single male. After a week, they all bonded very well and we had a very happy group . . . until three months later the youngest ones came into adolesence. At that point in time we began to find traces of blood about the cage. Now, initially we had no idea who the blood was coming from, and we hadn't seen anything to tell us why someone was bleeding to begin with. They were doing their fighting mostly at night it seemed, when we couldn't hear them. Then I began to hear fighting during the day, and came to the conclusion that our original goo, Reep, was the instigator. I did what I could to try and control the situation, but it became evident at the two weeks mark that we needed a second cage in a hurry. At that point, we separated them, the two younger brothers together, Reep apart. We had realized that Peekachew was covered in bites, and so was the blood source, and figured out that he and Reep were the primary combatants. The most timid one, we swapped back and forth between Reep and Peek so that neither was alone for extended times. It took another week to realize that the REAL offender was actually Peek!! Reep had been the dominant degu from the beginning, but now Peek, having entered adolesence, was feeling driven to challenge the status quo and was making his bid for dominance. It turned out the Peek was instigating every fight, and Reep was only defending himself. In all the months we dealt with fighting, Reep may have had at the most one cut, Peek always faired much worse, yet Peek would NOT give up, no matter what. Finally at the end of a long five months, Peek submitted to Reep, and did so repeatedly for several days, and the peace has been WONDERFUL.

Now for your situation, I find myself wondering if the staff at P@H have made the same assumption as I did at the beginning of the trouble, and have actually separated out the wrong degu, leaving the contender with the king he wishes to dethrone. One of the things that made significant difference for our three, or in particular our two, was when I finally got rather fed up with the whole thing and started to correct them like I would my kids. If I heard swearing, gnashing, and tail banging going on between the two cages (they were in separate cages at this point), I would walk up to the cage, and say a loud firm "NO!" If that didn't stop them I would SQUEAK really loud. If that didn't stop them I would either blow on them rather hard, or tap the cage hard enough to make a bang. This would usually stop the bickering and demonstrating for a minute, and then it would start up again. I would repeat my correction, and usually about ten minutes later they would calm down for a while. Sometimes only 30 minutes, and sometimes a couple of hours. This is something I consistently kept up, and I had no qualms about letting them know and understand that I was unhappy with their behavior. As the days and then weeks passed, the conflicts through the bars grew fewer and fewer, until they just didn't happen and I began to let them meet again in the bathtub. Then one night I got the boys all mixed up and found in the morning that Reep and Peek had spent the night together . . . PEACEFULLY! What a relief!! I then saw Peek submitting to Reep, throwing himself on his back in front of Reep and begging to be groomed. By the end of a weeks time, I was totally confident that they had truly gotten past their trouble.

I would recommend that you find ways to sternly inform them that you as top goo will not let them fight and they must get along. I hope that will help? And let us know how you are doing, please.

[wiserabbit]

Thanks guys.

Well Tau and Sonar seem to have sorted out their differences - no more wounds on either of them and they are now sleeping in a heap and there is grooming behaviour. We've had their health check this morning and they were both ok, though Tau has been given a course of baytril to be on the safe side from those wounds.

They were both spectacularly badly behaved at the vets; Tau bit the vet (breaking our unbroken record of good tame pets) and then hid in husband's t-shirt and would he hell come out. Sonar was better behaved but executed a leap and swan dive off the table and took five minutes of chasing round the surgery floor before being caught.

I suppose in our defence we've not had them three days yet, so haven't had chance to do much handling!!!!

[deguconvert]

LOL!! Sounds like a very eventful time! I bet they were tired when they got home and went right to sleep as soon as you popped them back into their cage.