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Post by darthchinchi on Feb 5, 2017 11:13:29 GMT
Hello. I've been lurking around on and off for some time. I often use your forum as a resource for feeding green.
I have chinchillas. Got my first back in 1997 and have been breeding since 2005
Recently we bought our first house, with a big garden that really need redoing, so my plan is to primarily plant edible plants for us and the chinchillas.
I've not been too active in the chin world over the past 3½ years as we have two kids at the age of 3½ and 1½ but I'm getting back into it. Big fan of SWC and getting a lot of info from Amy on plants and wild habitat.
Mostly joined here to get info on native plants from the Andes that people grow. Atm I'm looking into cacti and hibiscus, even though neither species I'm researching is native to the wild chinchillas home.
/Pia
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Post by moletteuk on Feb 5, 2017 17:28:53 GMT
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Post by darthchinchi on Feb 5, 2017 17:35:09 GMT
No, didn't see those. I'll look into those links, thanks But I often just go for what you would feed a gp or degu, but not as many veggies as with gp's And yes SWC is save the wild chinchilla unfortunately there's not a lot of animals left, even though they do see an improvement where they work. They also see degu families from time to time so the info on diet is quite limited, and there's this really annoying notion I some places that the wild and domesticated chinchilla is not the same animal, so you shouldn't freed anything but pellets and hay :/
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Post by deguconvert on Feb 5, 2017 20:30:45 GMT
Hello Pia, and welcome to the forum! It is lovely to have another chin owner. We don't have a whole of people with chins here, nor do we have many with lots of experience. We will be very interested to learn from you what you feed your chins, and what you know through your experiences and research!
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Post by darthchinchi on Feb 6, 2017 9:06:14 GMT
Thx for the welcome It's kind of experimental at the moment. My german is not as good as it used to be, so I'm a slow reader and thus prefere english resources My views on a lot of topics might be a bit controversial though.
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Post by Deleted on Feb 6, 2017 11:37:35 GMT
Hi and welcome! I don't have chins personally but it's great there are more chin owners piping up! x
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Post by moletteuk on Feb 6, 2017 14:47:31 GMT
We've noticed that chinchilla diet and care can get a bit controversial quite quickly, some of our members have noticed that chinchillas can be rather fragile, more so than degus.
I think it would be great if you would like to share what you feed your chinchillas, how that has changed over the years and what you noticed about how the chins react along the way.
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Post by darthchinchi on Feb 6, 2017 18:34:24 GMT
moletteuk I've made a post in the chinchilla feeding section. I do not agree with them being more fragile. Not at all. Imo the problem is they are only fed a limited diet so when introduced to new items, especially in too big ammounts, they will get problems. But I'm guessing that if you only fed a degu a pure pellet and hay diet, and then one day switched them ower to 100% green you would get the impression the degu was fragile. After I've started feeding a virarity of food and treats I more or less never experience this problem with bad reactions to new food items. And I can go between different brands of pellets with no reaction at all. But if I get a new animal that's used to only pellets, I need to hold back on treats as they react to it very quickly. It takes a couple of weeks to a month to get the new animals up to speed, digestive wise, on the mixed diet I give.
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Post by moletteuk on Feb 6, 2017 20:34:16 GMT
Great I think it seems logical that any animal with a very limited diet is going to have limited gut flora diversity and therefore take time to adapt to digesting new things. Particularly caviomorphs with a caecum, the digestive chamber based on microbial fermentation.
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