Chinchilla feeding - my primary reason to join this forum
Feb 6, 2017 18:28:41 GMT
deguconvert, natnat899, and 2 more like this
Post by darthchinchi on Feb 6, 2017 18:28:41 GMT
I'm making this post to explain why I joined.
I do not expect that all agree with my ways, as chinchilla feeding and treats is a highly controversial topic. Recently I've seen groups on Facebook, where talk about the "German Way" is not allowed, as people do not believe in this.
This highly saddens me, as I truly believe the only way to evolve is to learn from each other, especially out side our own countries. Denmark is kind of like this. We are quite small when it comes to chinchillas, even though we have a lot of furfarmers. A very positive thing about the furfarmers is how they have the opportunity to test new things in the chinchilla feed. But we also have the priviledge that we get animals from all over the world, and exchange knowledge with the new people we get to know. It's not uncommon for a pedigree to contain animals from 2-3 different countries besides Denmark.
But back to the issue of feeding.
As there's not that many wild animals back, it's hard to get any proper info on what the wild ones eat. On top of this it's becomming a popular notion, that the domesticated chinchilla and the wild chinchilla is not the same animal, and for some reason people think the digestive track of the animals have changed over the past 100 years, even though our domesticated dog still has more or less the same digestive track as a wolf, and we have been breeding these for the past 19,000+ years.
I've had chinchillas for the past 20 years, and have been active in the community in Denmark for about 15 years, so I've seen a bit of evolvement within the community both negative and positive.
When I started out we didn't feed the animals anything but pellets, hay and the odd rasin. People thought almost every thing else would kill the animals. Poor knowledge on dietary needs made people feed them all kinds of stuff and wrong ammounts of stuff, so we ended up with at lot of sick chinchillas mainly due to obesity.
As people learned, we went from one extreme to the other. Where people gave treats like nuts before, but in way too big ammounts, nuts became a big nono. People talked about how as little as a nut or two a month would lead to obesity and kill the animal.
With time a little group of us got people to understand that feeding with fx nuts is not a problem but it should be done in moderation, as with any other form of treat.
With time I learned about Save the Wild Chinchillas, and looked up the scarce information on what the wilde ones eat, and this actually backed up my theory that they can eat fresh food and nuts as they liv of off roots, leaves, steams, flowers and seeds from a large virarity of plants. They also eat some fruits and are known to take a few insects and even eggs. I've actually seen one of my own specificly hunt down daddy longlegs and eat them whenever he was out running.
At some point SWC came out with info on the chinchillas drinking habbits. I had only ever heard they would drink the dew from plants. But this new info talked about how they may be eating a species of succulent to get enough fluids. This radically changed my views on feeding other fresh foods than just grasses and herbs like thyme with very little moisture in them.
I also have a firm believe that by feeding a virarity of items I help my animals cope if they should get hold of something they should not eat, as their system is used to different items. Therfore I do not recommend going from a mainly pellet and hay based diet, to a lot of different dried foods or fresh herbs and veggies, as the animals are not used to this, and will become ill. It's not uncommon for a chinchilla to get tummy problems when going from one brand of pellet to an other. Thats why new owners get a bag of feed when they buy their new pet. It's no different when trying out dried or fresh foods. Small ammounts to being with, or the animals will end up with problems.
The problem is if one person is too quict to try something out, theres something wrong with that one thing/bag. or the chin gets sick at the same time it is offerd a new item, the item is deemed unsafe. More often than not, it only takes 1 chinchilla that gets sick, to make everybody tink it's bad, even if 100 chinchillas did great on it.
Basically I do not agree that any animal can thrive on a pellet as a prime source of food and only get hay as an alternative, especially not when we only know very little about the wild animals feeding habits. The chinchilla pellet is made to get animals with a high fur quality and thrive in a breeding situation. It also works for pet chinchillas, but as far as I know theres really no studies into the different requirements for show and breeding animals vs pets, and one would think the requirements would differ enough to make different types of pellets for each type of pet chinchilla.
As for feeding my own animals fresh stuff, I haven't been giving them anything on a regular basis. I do like bamboo though. Great source of entertainment and they get the fiber they need. We've always had a lot of bamboo and I've been harvesting when it got too big. We've also had a lot of different trees with the need to cut down a couple every few years, giving me the opportunity to give my animals a lot of different wood. I've been hoarding dried herbs and flowers for as long as I can remember and been mixing it in with their pellets, but not talked about it openly until recently as people thought it was a big problem. But from what I've seen in my animals, the diversity in food offered triggers their foarging instinct. They do thend to leav out items they do not want as much. I did kind of a small test at one time where I had 2 bowls in one cage and offered 2 different types of pellets in each. On a period of a couple of monts, we could clearly see the animals changing back an forth between the two types of feed, and they actually appeared to thrive better when we had this little thing going on. It was only on two animals though, so there's nothing signifigant to the test, other than it worked for my animals. Others repport that animals thrive on pellets only instead of a mixed feed, but more often than not the mixed feed is not homemade but store bought with a lot of treats in it, like rasins, banana and apple.
A few years ago I started growing my own herbs for cooking, and when they get too big, I cut them down and feed them to the chinnies.
On a last note, I'm not that big of a fan when it comes to dried fruit. In the process the fruit sugar is crystallised becoming the "bad" sugar we know from every day life. Personally I'de much rather give my animals some fresh fruit, even though some are high in asids. As for rasins I personally think it's a problem that this is a favorite treat for chinchillas. It has a very high conventration of suger, it has a lot of iron in it, and it can lead to diarreah if given in too big ammounts. I don't mind it as an occasional treat but it baffels me that rasins are okay but nuts and seeds are seen as a killer in some places.
I feel degus are a lot further ahead when it comes to feeding green and I don't mind experimentiong on my own animals, within reason, as they are used to diversity. Even though degus and chinchillas are not the same, they roughly originate in the same place, and have the same food source available to them. I don't get why chinchillas are seen as so much more fragile than degus, when it comes to food, so when looking for new stuff, I often look into what degus eat, or what guinea pigs eat. Guinea pigs does live where the vegetation is a lot greener, but as they are so closely related I don't mind buying dried herbs and veggies meant for GP's - or degus. I actually started out getting my items from chinchillas2shop back in the day when they still shipped out side of the UK and had a more specialized produck section. Back the it was the chinchillas we could feed all the stuff, and the degu could have a few of the same things. Now it's the other way around and I actually think it's a big problem, adding to the health problems of the chinchillas, that I read occur on a regular basis in other countries.
Sorry for any spelling errors or wrong gramma.
I do not expect that all agree with my ways, as chinchilla feeding and treats is a highly controversial topic. Recently I've seen groups on Facebook, where talk about the "German Way" is not allowed, as people do not believe in this.
This highly saddens me, as I truly believe the only way to evolve is to learn from each other, especially out side our own countries. Denmark is kind of like this. We are quite small when it comes to chinchillas, even though we have a lot of furfarmers. A very positive thing about the furfarmers is how they have the opportunity to test new things in the chinchilla feed. But we also have the priviledge that we get animals from all over the world, and exchange knowledge with the new people we get to know. It's not uncommon for a pedigree to contain animals from 2-3 different countries besides Denmark.
But back to the issue of feeding.
As there's not that many wild animals back, it's hard to get any proper info on what the wild ones eat. On top of this it's becomming a popular notion, that the domesticated chinchilla and the wild chinchilla is not the same animal, and for some reason people think the digestive track of the animals have changed over the past 100 years, even though our domesticated dog still has more or less the same digestive track as a wolf, and we have been breeding these for the past 19,000+ years.
I've had chinchillas for the past 20 years, and have been active in the community in Denmark for about 15 years, so I've seen a bit of evolvement within the community both negative and positive.
When I started out we didn't feed the animals anything but pellets, hay and the odd rasin. People thought almost every thing else would kill the animals. Poor knowledge on dietary needs made people feed them all kinds of stuff and wrong ammounts of stuff, so we ended up with at lot of sick chinchillas mainly due to obesity.
As people learned, we went from one extreme to the other. Where people gave treats like nuts before, but in way too big ammounts, nuts became a big nono. People talked about how as little as a nut or two a month would lead to obesity and kill the animal.
With time a little group of us got people to understand that feeding with fx nuts is not a problem but it should be done in moderation, as with any other form of treat.
With time I learned about Save the Wild Chinchillas, and looked up the scarce information on what the wilde ones eat, and this actually backed up my theory that they can eat fresh food and nuts as they liv of off roots, leaves, steams, flowers and seeds from a large virarity of plants. They also eat some fruits and are known to take a few insects and even eggs. I've actually seen one of my own specificly hunt down daddy longlegs and eat them whenever he was out running.
At some point SWC came out with info on the chinchillas drinking habbits. I had only ever heard they would drink the dew from plants. But this new info talked about how they may be eating a species of succulent to get enough fluids. This radically changed my views on feeding other fresh foods than just grasses and herbs like thyme with very little moisture in them.
I also have a firm believe that by feeding a virarity of items I help my animals cope if they should get hold of something they should not eat, as their system is used to different items. Therfore I do not recommend going from a mainly pellet and hay based diet, to a lot of different dried foods or fresh herbs and veggies, as the animals are not used to this, and will become ill. It's not uncommon for a chinchilla to get tummy problems when going from one brand of pellet to an other. Thats why new owners get a bag of feed when they buy their new pet. It's no different when trying out dried or fresh foods. Small ammounts to being with, or the animals will end up with problems.
The problem is if one person is too quict to try something out, theres something wrong with that one thing/bag. or the chin gets sick at the same time it is offerd a new item, the item is deemed unsafe. More often than not, it only takes 1 chinchilla that gets sick, to make everybody tink it's bad, even if 100 chinchillas did great on it.
Basically I do not agree that any animal can thrive on a pellet as a prime source of food and only get hay as an alternative, especially not when we only know very little about the wild animals feeding habits. The chinchilla pellet is made to get animals with a high fur quality and thrive in a breeding situation. It also works for pet chinchillas, but as far as I know theres really no studies into the different requirements for show and breeding animals vs pets, and one would think the requirements would differ enough to make different types of pellets for each type of pet chinchilla.
As for feeding my own animals fresh stuff, I haven't been giving them anything on a regular basis. I do like bamboo though. Great source of entertainment and they get the fiber they need. We've always had a lot of bamboo and I've been harvesting when it got too big. We've also had a lot of different trees with the need to cut down a couple every few years, giving me the opportunity to give my animals a lot of different wood. I've been hoarding dried herbs and flowers for as long as I can remember and been mixing it in with their pellets, but not talked about it openly until recently as people thought it was a big problem. But from what I've seen in my animals, the diversity in food offered triggers their foarging instinct. They do thend to leav out items they do not want as much. I did kind of a small test at one time where I had 2 bowls in one cage and offered 2 different types of pellets in each. On a period of a couple of monts, we could clearly see the animals changing back an forth between the two types of feed, and they actually appeared to thrive better when we had this little thing going on. It was only on two animals though, so there's nothing signifigant to the test, other than it worked for my animals. Others repport that animals thrive on pellets only instead of a mixed feed, but more often than not the mixed feed is not homemade but store bought with a lot of treats in it, like rasins, banana and apple.
A few years ago I started growing my own herbs for cooking, and when they get too big, I cut them down and feed them to the chinnies.
On a last note, I'm not that big of a fan when it comes to dried fruit. In the process the fruit sugar is crystallised becoming the "bad" sugar we know from every day life. Personally I'de much rather give my animals some fresh fruit, even though some are high in asids. As for rasins I personally think it's a problem that this is a favorite treat for chinchillas. It has a very high conventration of suger, it has a lot of iron in it, and it can lead to diarreah if given in too big ammounts. I don't mind it as an occasional treat but it baffels me that rasins are okay but nuts and seeds are seen as a killer in some places.
I feel degus are a lot further ahead when it comes to feeding green and I don't mind experimentiong on my own animals, within reason, as they are used to diversity. Even though degus and chinchillas are not the same, they roughly originate in the same place, and have the same food source available to them. I don't get why chinchillas are seen as so much more fragile than degus, when it comes to food, so when looking for new stuff, I often look into what degus eat, or what guinea pigs eat. Guinea pigs does live where the vegetation is a lot greener, but as they are so closely related I don't mind buying dried herbs and veggies meant for GP's - or degus. I actually started out getting my items from chinchillas2shop back in the day when they still shipped out side of the UK and had a more specialized produck section. Back the it was the chinchillas we could feed all the stuff, and the degu could have a few of the same things. Now it's the other way around and I actually think it's a big problem, adding to the health problems of the chinchillas, that I read occur on a regular basis in other countries.
Sorry for any spelling errors or wrong gramma.
I'm really pleased that you have had such a great result with your forage experiments, Random, lots of different species tried already, do you feel your confidence is building?
), radical changes in body size and shape has some serious health problems. Like large dog breedss that has a lot of problems with short lifespans as their harts can't keep up with that big body. I've actually been banned from an UK based FB group, as I pointed out that the main breeder on the site people really looked up to, had seriously overweight chinchillas (I still have a pictur I can pm if anybody wants to see). But this breeders animals kept on winning big at shows. I did show the pictures to some of our judges who judge in multiple countries, and all agreed that this chinchilla was fat. But in the eyes of this one breeder, I was just trolling and because of this I was kicked out.
