Degus out of the blue fighting

[lesliekennith]

Hi I hope someone can help me. I have had a lone female for a while but I got another lone Degu that I slowly introduced to each other. They started living together about three weeks ago and have been best friends all of a sudden last night though my white female keeps nudging her head under the brown female to get to her cone. This keeps aggravating the brown Degu who will squeak and throw her hands at the white one. The white one will continuously do this until a fight breaks out. I split them up last night and tried them again this morning and again the white Degu keeps going for the brown ones come which upsets her and starts a fight

 

[savvy]

Can you remind me of the ages involved?

This could be dominance fighting or it could be that the agouti (brown) degu is on heat.

[lesliekennith]

They are both around 3 years old both have lived with degus before but I rescued them both as solo degus

[savvy]

Has there been an increase in activity in the agouti? Or any increase in squeaking?

[lesliekennith]

The brown one has been very quietly squeaking almost all day very high pitched but very quietly

[savvy]

Is she behaving normally otherwise as in eating and drinking? Have you checked her for any injuries etc.?

[lesliekennith]

Yeah she’s acting normal no visible injuries

[savvy]

This does sound like she's on heat. If so, things should settle down in a couple of days. Unless there are injuries or they are going into FBOD fighting, you should be able to put them together.

Tempers may be a bit frayed, but they need to sort some issues out between themselves.

[lesliekennith]

Thank you for your help it’s so weird they are now good as gold again all snuggled up together looking very sorry for themselves

[deguconvert]

Sounds pretty typical. Just keep an eye on them. Sometimes it takes longer for the personality differences to show up, and then comes a season of working things through to a settled and mutual agreement.