Cage Quandary

[Rtho87]

I'm hoping to adopt a pair of 7 week old degu girls in a few weeks. (They aren't from a breeder or pet shop, but another degu owner.) I'm planning to carefully introduce them to my current two degus and, fingers crossed, end up with a group of four living together. 

The pups will be housed separately, though I'm trying to decide where to put them. My adults live in the Savic Suite Royal XL for the most part, and in the evenings after a bit of free roaming, they often get wheeled out in a smaller cage (a Blenheim Extra Tall Rat cage) in a room where they can have more human company and interaction. I was thinking of housing the pups in the Blenheim and keeping it permanently next to the Savic, but it has wide bar spacing (2.5cm), so I imagine they would still be small enough to squeeze between the bars and escape! A thought I had was to get some extra wire to cover the Blenheim, and I wondered how to go about that and where to buy it (it's difficult to find advice through Google!). Or if anyone here has ever needed to do that with their cage? A simple solution would be to house the adults in the Blenheim and the pups in the Savic, though I would feel absolutely terrible about taking the adults' spacious cage away from them, and I'm sure they wouldn't be impressed!

The other thought I had was to split the Savic in two. It would be easy to block off the middle level and have one pair of degus in the top and the other in the bottom, but I've often read having degus live side by side is better for introductions. Being terrible at DIY, I wondered if there were any instructions out there on how to split a cage lengthways? And to find out about any of your own experiences with splitting a cage? Or, with the way the Savic is constructed, I could possibly dismantle it into two cages that sit side by side, though one of them would be missing a roof or floor... 

[savvy]

OK, first things first....

2.5cm is more than enough for a 7 week old to get through, it would be a bit like walking through a gate, so wrapping the blenheim in wire and putting it beside the savic would be the best solution.

Wire on a roll can be purchased from a good DIY shop (search for chicken wire) and can be secured to the cage by clips or cable ties.

Intros do go better when the cages are side by side.

[moletteuk]

I would wrap the Blenheim in 13mm (max) mesh, which you should be able to get from Wickes or Ebay. I'm not sure how easy it will be to attach it tightly everywhere, you might need lots of small pieces of wire to wire the layers together.

Will it cause you a problem if trying to unite the two groups doesn't go well? I tend to think introductions are easier if you can approach it as a bonus if it works out, rather than having a lot riding on it.

[teemu]

Mar 9, 2022 20:07:39 GMT moletteuk said:

I would wrap the Blenheim in 13mm (max) mesh, which you should be able to get from Wickes or Ebay. I'm not sure how easy it will be to attach it tightly everywhere, you might need lots of small pieces of wire to wire the layers together.

Will it cause you a problem if trying to unite the two groups doesn't go well? I tend to think introductions are easier if you can approach it as a bonus if it works out, rather than having a lot riding on it.

I've done cage jury-rigging like this. It's entirely doable, but requires a lot of patience and a good pair of pliers. As you say, you simply need a whole lot of wire. Due to the way it behaves, you have to attach the mesh at a whole lot of points to get it to stay flush against the cage bars. Otherwise there will be pockets, and the pups might climb through the bars and get trapped in the mesh (or more likely just find some opening at a given edge of it and crawl out).

Still, it's not a terrible amount of work, ultimately. It might take a couple of hours, but mesh and cage bars are generally pretty easy to work with. The biggest thing to watch out for would be making sure that all the ends of the wire stick outwards, away from the cage, and also to bend down any edges in the mesh. It'll be easier to fit it on if you measure the pieces in advance, per cage side, and then cut them out of the mesh, rather than trying to wrap the whole cage in mesh. You don't need to be exactly on the money, as you can trim off excess or add on smaller extra pieces.

(The wire can actually be rather small gauge, since it's not actually holding up a great deal of weight. You just need a good deal of it.)

[deguconvert]

You would do well to have a sturdy pair of gloves, perhaps leather, so that you don't cut or puncture yourself on the wire. It's not pleasant. When I did a wire overlay on a cage with wide bars, I didn't start with gloves as I should have, and I very much regretted it.

[Rtho87]

Thank you all for the advice and tips! I will get started on covering the Blenheim with mesh. 

Thanks for all those details, teemu! Being impatient with this sort of thing, I definitely wouldn't think to cut the mesh into smaller pieces, but rather try to cover it all at once. x)

Will it cause you a problem if trying to unite the two groups doesn't go well? I tend to think introductions are easier if you can approach it as a bonus if it works out, rather than having a lot riding on it.

It wouldn't be the end of the world if they would prefer to live in two separate pairs, though I would need to invest in a better cage for the pups, because the Blenheim falls a bit short when it comes to recommended floor space. That shouldn't be a problem financially, providing I didn't buy one at the same time that Alice needed a dental! (Talking of her teeth, she has been doing much better since her last dental back at the end of January.)

You would do well to have a sturdy pair of gloves, perhaps leather, so that you don't cut or puncture yourself on the wire. It's not pleasant. When I did a wire overlay on a cage with wide bars, I didn't start with gloves as I should have, and I very much regretted it.

Ouch!!!