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Post by teemu on Oct 18, 2021 20:00:25 GMT
Hey all, I just realized that Posso has lost a lot of weight in a rather short period of time. I'm not sure of the exact time span, but I think it was about a month ago I noted that Posso seemed a bit skinny. I weighed her then, and she was an even 200 grams. Since she doesn't like to be handled, it was only today I realized she was looking a lot skinnier still. Weighing her, she was now just 180g. This is concerning, since at this age her weight should be going up!
I'm wondering what might be causing this. When I observe her eating, she seems to eat normally and has no issues that would hint at teeth problems. I'm not sure how often or much she eats (obviously not enough, in any case), but their food bowls empty at a steady rate and the hay gets used. Just now, I gave her some extra seeds, which she ate up quickly and with no issue at all. She is, from all I can see, energetic and active otherwise as well. And she's so young that I wouldn't expect tooth issues yet in any case (although nothing's impossible...).
It's strange. I wonder if it has to do with the fact that Suti has been going at her pretty mercilessly lately and has, from what I can see, cemented herself as the pack leader? Maybe I should try to feed her more in private? She did not really seem to be impressed with CC, and I can't just give her seeds every day...
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Post by deguconvert on Oct 18, 2021 22:29:41 GMT
Feeding her separately might be a route you need to take for a while. If Suti is being very aggressive, that may also be expressed by preventing Posso from having free access to the food sources. How many bowls of food do you keep in the cage? Are they far enough from each other that they can eat in peace? When I had seven females all together in a large cage, I had 3-4 bowls for food in there spread out through the cage, and 4 water bottles.
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Post by hpdegus on Oct 18, 2021 22:30:46 GMT
Something very similar is going on with my Pickett as well. He's also very active and happy to chow down, but lost a ton of weight. I'll be taking him in this week to get his teeth checked out. Diabetes induced weight loss also came to mind.
Sorry I don't have any advice, other than maybe to get her to a vet just for your peace of mind, but I hope you're able to figure this out soon!
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Post by teemu on Oct 19, 2021 0:43:01 GMT
Feeding her separately might be a route you need to take for a while. If Suti is being very aggressive, that may also be expressed by preventing Posso from having free access to the food sources. How many bowls of food do you keep in the cage? Are they far enough from each other that they can eat in peace? When I had seven females all together in a large cage, I had 3-4 bowls for food in there spread out through the cage, and 4 water bottles.
Yeah, I'll have to see if I can get her to eat separately. Problem is, she's pretty nervous and does not really want to eat any normal food when handled, and she hasn't been impressed by CC at all, so I'm not sure how I would feed her...
They do have two food bowls, more or less literally at the opposite ends of the cage, but of course they vastly prefer one over the other, and I have seen Suti hogging the water and food stations at times. She doesn't hog them all the time, of course, but that might still be contributing to this. Maybe I should try to see about moving the other food bowl towards the same end of the cage, but to a different level. The girls generally prefer one end of the cage over the other, so maybe having a free bowl around there would get Posso more intrested in food.
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Post by deguconvert on Oct 19, 2021 4:24:40 GMT
For both of you, it might be an idea to get some Diastix glucose test strips to see if there is glucose in the urine. That might let you know if diabetes is the cause of their unexplained weight loss.
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Post by moletteuk on Oct 19, 2021 10:44:40 GMT
I would try adding a third food bowl, so you have one per degu, and all in different locations. You could also try to encourage them to each 'own' a bowl. So you would give Suti a bowl in the preferred location, and then second degu in second location and then try to lure third degu away to a different place so they can all eat in peace for a little while. It may or may not work, it may or may not even help, depends on their eating habits. Mine kind of trained themselves into this system and I found it fairly useful.
Do they have pellets available all the time?
See if you can monitor her eating and see if Suti is preventing her eating or if she is spending significant time running away which could be burning a lot of calories and reducing her time spent eating. First priority is to find out if it is a health issue or behavioural.
I don't really think CC is an ideal way forward if she is fully healthy. If she is being bullied out of eating, I think a food bowl in a travel cage or some kind of low key divider or separation at the same time every day might be a better option.
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Post by teemu on Oct 19, 2021 14:39:46 GMT
Yeah, I've shifted the food bowls around now, and I've added an additional one just in case it helps. I have seen Suti blocking her before, so hopefully having more bowls allows her to eat when she feels like it. Suti doesn't chase her too much now, but from what I've seen, Posso is generally very active and is a bit pickier about her food than the other two. Like, she totally goes for treats, and is very quick to run pick up the choiciest bits of new hay when I put it into the cage, but she's generally more suspicious of new treats and doesn't forage as much as the others. She vacuums up sunflower seeds and the like really quickly, though.
Good news though, I re-weighed her today, and the scale was showing 190g today. It's possible that the scale was a bit unstable the first time I did it, or something like that. I checked it a couple of times, but it was showing 190-192 each time. So at least she hasn't lost nearly as much weight as I thought, though she still has lost some grams. Maybe that much weight loss is understandable, given how much Suti has gone after her over the past couple of months? Luckily that's at least calmed down now. She no longer chases Posso or beats her up.
She really seems to enjoy eating dried leaves and the choiciest bits of hay, so I guess I should make sure they're always available for her.
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Post by moletteuk on Oct 19, 2021 18:05:29 GMT
I don't know if you have much choice in pellets where you are, but you could try adding in a different type, it might regain her interest a little. Some alfalfa hay could be another thing worth trying too.
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Post by teemu on Oct 20, 2021 17:32:01 GMT
I got the girls some fancy new food. It's not in pellets, but it's a grain-free, low-sugar degu/chinchilla feed. Probably not something I'll want to give them as their main food (experience suggests that rodents tend to get really picky about non-pellet foods and just snatch up all the tasty bits and shun the rest until they get more of the good stuff), but at the moment Posso seems mighty impressed by it, especially the main constituent which is some sort of rough, pressed chunks (might be alfalfa pellets of some sort). So that should be good at enticing her to eat more Also got them more apple tree branches and dried forage leaves, so hopefully she'll be eating a bit more.
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Post by moletteuk on Oct 20, 2021 18:19:32 GMT
The grassy pellets in mix foods are usually the healthy stuff you want them to eat, so it's great that she is eating those.
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Post by teemu on Oct 23, 2021 17:27:04 GMT
Well, today Posso was showing 201g again on the scale. So I think the dip must have just been a fluke? Maybe she just hadn't eaten much that day.
On a sidenote, Limppu only weighs 183g, and her weight hasn't really changed lately. Her smaller size (not skinnyness, actual size) is really starting to show at this point. She eats a lot, too, so I think she's just planning remaining a runt...
I wonder if it would be good to try and feed her more anyway? She probably wouldn't gain much actual, structural size any more, but she's so small that anything would be good.
(And Suti's up to a sturdy 215g and looking like the most standard one of the bunch, next to the slender Posso and runty Limppu.)
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Post by deguconvert on Oct 23, 2021 18:47:55 GMT
What are their ages now? Degus continue to put on size and maturity up to a year of age. Most are as big as they will be at six months, but some do still grow beyond that age.
As you have said . . . she may just be very tiny.
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Post by teemu on Oct 23, 2021 18:55:10 GMT
They're all pretty much exactly 8 months now, give or take a week. As you say, I don't think I've seen Limppu putting on any new weight for about two months. They will probably all get some growth, still, but it does seem like Limppu has decided to be very small. She actually looks larger than she is, since she actually has a very thick coat of fur, very fluffy and luxurious, but when you handle her, it's obvious that there's not nearly as much degu underneath that. Luckily, it seems like she's totally fine regardless
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Post by teemu on Nov 3, 2021 10:41:11 GMT
Well, as a followup, it might have been a huge mistake to actually put some of that tasty, yummy food in the girls' food bowls even once. Suti has now realized that instead of regular boring pellets, the bowls COULD contain much tastier things. She systematically empties and drags away the bowls every time I fill them.
It's absolutely not incidental. She carefully inspects the bowl, realizes there's no yummies in there, grabs it by the edge and DUMPS everything inside out. And since it's a light metal bowl, she then grabs it and drags it off to the side. I think she's actually thinking that if she does it enough, I will put better things in it.
I've gone through ridiculously many pellets over the past week because Suti keeps dumping them and I can't salvage nearly everything. Time to invest in a heavier bowl, it seems...
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Post by winic1 on Nov 3, 2021 13:31:07 GMT
A low, wide, heavy bowl works great, they can see what they want without having to dump it over, and it's much harder to dump over. Something that's kind of like the tray you put under a potted plant--enough side to keep things in, but very shallow.
And definitely put the second, or third, bowl on a different level. I had problems with Chester not letting Chitter near the bowl, so I started the second bowl on the level below, and by tapping and giving treats (don't let the first one see) and basically leading him there, taught him where it was. So at food time, I'd fill Chester's bowl first, and Chitter would run down and be waiting by his bowl on the level below by the time I had a scoop of food to put in it for him.
Two bowls on the same level, even if apart, still lets the dominant goo see the other eating, and intimidate him away. On a different level, the other bowl and other goo are out of sight, out of mind. Each can eat in peace.
Good idea to have two water bottles on different levels, also. For the same reason as the food bowls, and also so that should a goo be trapped on one level, either by dominance or someone accidentally pushing something over the hole between, there's always water available.
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Post by winic1 on Nov 3, 2021 13:46:28 GMT
A low, wide, heavy bowl works great, they can see what they want without having to dump it over, and it's much harder to dump over. Something that's kind of like the tray you put under a potted plant--enough side to keep things in, but very shallow.
And definitely put the second, or third, bowl on a different level. I had problems with Chester not letting Chitter near the bowl, so I started the second bowl on the level below, and by tapping and giving treats (don't let the first one see) and basically leading him there, taught him where it was. So at food time, I'd fill Chester's bowl first, and Chitter would run down and be waiting by his bowl on the level below by the time I had a scoop of food to put in it for him.
Two bowls on the same level, even if apart, still lets the dominant goo see the other eating, and intimidate him away. On a different level, the other bowl and other goo are out of sight, out of mind. Each can eat in peace.
Good idea to have two water bottles on different levels, also. For the same reason as the food bowls, and also so that should a goo be trapped on one level, either by dominance or someone accidentally pushing something over the hole between, there's always water available.
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Post by winic1 on Nov 3, 2021 13:55:29 GMT
Another thing we did was to have separate bowls for separate kinds of food. That way they knew that regular pellets were always in this bowl, but the good stuff would be in that other bowl, the seeds over there in that small tray....stops them from digging into and wasting the regular stuff in hopes of finding something special down the bottom.
Also makes it easier to see when they have eaten all of one food, and need a refill; or to keep track of how much and how quickly they eat each kind of food.
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Post by moletteuk on Nov 3, 2021 16:18:33 GMT
This sounds like a classic human vs degu battle. Good luck Teemu!
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Post by teemu on Nov 4, 2021 21:09:22 GMT
Yeah, I swapped their lightweight metal food bowls with heavy, ceramic dog food bowls. Ain't no way Suti is throwing those around now! They do have multiple bowls nowadays, but it looks like they all prefer the same food bowl on the second level, for whatever reason. I guess related to hierarchy issues maybe. I've been experimenting with moving them around to find an arrangement that works for everyone, but no clear winner yet.
Also, I don't really know, but it honestly seems like Suti just finds trashing her food bowl and cage very fun - at least from the way she spends a lot of time doing it at the expense of basically all other entertainment. I've let them have one metal food bowl, which is actually empty now, because she spends a lot of time dragging the bowl around the cage and THROWING it around. I did not know that a degu could hurl something like that, but she's started this thing where she grabs the bowl, runs around and hurls it at the cage bars. I tried to take it away, thinking she was for some reason finding it offensive and wanted it gone, but she dragged it back in when I offered it. If she finds that fun, then I guess... good for her?
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Post by deguconvert on Nov 5, 2021 6:12:23 GMT
Hmmm! I wonder if she would learn to play fetch? You know, she is so smart and so busy, I wonder if she would find it fun to learn things, like jumping through hoops, or puzzles, or fetch, or . . . whatever you could devise?
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