We recently had an email from Mikayla, who’s a keen chinchilla owner. Here’s what she wrote:
Hi, my name is Mikayla and I have recently have discovered your website through your chinchilla bumper sticker give-away. I was very excited to see that you had a blog set up for chinchillas, but I had a few questions about your information on nutrition. I know this is a very debatable subject within chinchilla owners and I’d like to give my two cents.
I believe that any kind of fruit or veggie- dried or otherwise- is to be left out of a chinchilla’s diet entirely. Fruits have a high content of natural sugars that are not a part of a chinchilla’s natural diet. This can (as I am sure you know) cause bloat which leads to stasis and quite often to death. After losing a chinchilla to stasis (not because of diet-related causes, but due to surgery complications) I am VERY against any sort of treats that contain sugar, I only give my boys a raisin once a month after their hair ring checks. My chins favorite treats are non-frosted shredded mini wheats, old-fashioned oats and rosehips. Their all-time favorite treat is a homemade supplement called Lifeline which is made by Chocolate Chinchillas, but she is currently not taking orders (much to my dismay, I have enough to only last me a while longer!)
I would love for you to think about my opinion and get in touch with me. I’d be glad to send you some pictures of my nine babies.
Well, Mikayla – first of all can we say thanks so much for getting in touch. This is exactly the kind of community we are at SPS, and we encourage anyone with concerns over animal health and nutrition to do the same.
Picture by uhoh over and reproduced under attribution licence courtesy of Creative Commons and Flickr
So – to the chinchilla fruit and veggie issue. Yes – fundamentally we agree that these should not be included in their diet, although we are aware that people do like to give the odd raisin here and there, as you say, for a treat.
But, as you rightly bring up, the high sugar content in such treats are detrimental to a chin’s health – and too much can cause serious, if not fatal, consequences.
Anyway – as an aside to that, in response to Mikayla’s email we’re going to revise the section on our nutrition paper to make this point as crystal clear as possible. Yes – we are aware that people feed fruit and/or dried veggies to their chinchillas as treats, but it really is a practice that should be avoided as a general rule. After all, we all want the best for our pets, and no-one ever wants to be the cause of poor health.
As Mikayla suggests in her email, there are plenty of other yummy treats you can offer your chinnies. And they’ll still love you for it – honest…
So thanks Mikayla, for bringing this to our attention. We’re delighted that you’re joining in our SPS community. And we’re looking forward to seeing photos of your 9!! little babies.
Of course, we look forward from hearing from anyone who fancies getting in touch – for whatever reason. And rest assured that we’ll endeavor to get back to you just as quickly as is humanly possible.
Till next time – love those chinnies…
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The post Chinchillas and Treats – What NOT to Feed appeared first on Small Pet Select.
