Seven baby degus, all in a row! 
How I managed that photo-op, I'll never know.


 

My husband and I are animal lovers.  That can get us into a little bit of trouble.  Not a BAD kind of trouble, mind you.   Just the kind of trouble that leads to having a lot of pets. One night when we were watching television my husband said out of the blue, "We have a house full of heartbeats!" 

I looked around and saw our four cats, our dog, the cage of gouldian finches by the window, and heard the lone degu running on his wheel in the next room.  (The room that also had a king snake, a corn snake, and two red-eyed tree frogs and a fire-bellied toad!  But I digress!)

He had told me about the degu he saw at a small, crowded pet store that week.  It was making the most unhappy, pathetic noises.  He asked the store clerk about it and was told that the little guy was upset because his buddy was sold that day. 

So there he sat in his 10 gallon tank on the floor of the store watching the big feet stroll by as he cried and barked his heart out in pathetic wales.  A water bottle, a food dish, cedar chips, and the degu.

We started doing some research on degus because we really didn't know anything about them other than they kind of looked like a cross between a gerbil and a chinchilla.  We found out they could die of sheer depression when they were housed by themselves because they were such social animals.  We learned some more about them and the next time my husband went to the pet store he bought the  lonely little degu.

Now he's set up in an appropriate cage:  Roomy, made of wire walls for climbing but with a solid floor to avoid bumble foot.  (Bumble foot, we found out, would result from a degu having to live in a cage with a wire floor.)  Hard to find!  Most wire cages have wire floors.  You know where there are some great degu cages?  In the U.K.!  If I were in the U.K.  I would get a cage from John Hopewell.  They have solid floors, unlike most cages similar in the U.S. and they have nice depth to the bottom, unlike the flimsy plastic trays you find here.

We screwed wooden shelves for him to climb around the wall of the cage and hung an exercise wheel from top of the cage that the degu used almost constantly!  We used zip ties to keep the wheel in place.  (The zip ties were in a place the degu couldn't reach to chew.)

Degus can't metabolize sugar.  They're prone to diabetes.  We looked long and hard for a food besides Timothy hay and alfalfa hay.  One that didn't have sugar.  Finally my husband found a hamster food that had all kinds of interesting pieces but no sugar.  No raisins, no syrups, no honey, no added sugar of any kind. 

Once he was all set up we were on the lookout for a buddy for him!  Thinking I could tell the difference between a boy and a girl degu I decided that we actually had a girl on our hands.  We set out looking for another female.  One that was very young so the odds they would be able to live together in harmony were in their favor. 

Surprise, surprise!  After we had our two degu buddies long enough for the littlest girl to grow up we suddenly found out we had a litter of degu babies on our hands!  Silly me.  All I had to do was Google "How to sex a degu" and the image below shows up that clearly shows the difference between a male and female degu.  I would have known we had a male!  It's all just a matter of...spacing!  Not the usual visual cues.  Who knew.

 

It was a lot of fun having the baby degus around.  I wish I would have known enough to tell the difference between a boy and a girl sooner, but hey.  I learned my lesson!  So once the babies grew we took them to our favorite pet store that took great care of their animals, providing them a proper habitat and training their new owners of what kind of care they would need.  They found them very good homes.  One young newly-married couple took all four of the boys, another person took the two girls. 




 

That still left us with the dilemma of having a bonded breeding pair.  Eventually we got it right.  After the second litter we were able to rehome young momma with a couple of her daughters.  Daddy was our original degu mentioned at the beginning of this post.  Sadly, he was older in years and we lost him.  At least he died surrounded by his friends and family with all of the comforts of a good degu home.

We were left with one young male.  It didn't take long to find another young male to be his friend.  To this day they're still happily living together in their big degu house enjoying each other's company.  At first I didn't think I would be able to tell them apart.  It's funny, though.  Eventually you get to know them by how they are different, whether it's subtle differences in appearance or personalities.  The two we have now are easy to tell apart. 

Holding one of our degu babies.

The biggest male loves to run on the wheel.  He practically lives on that wheel!  The smaller one is is momma and daddy's little boy.  When I drape pieces of toilet paper all around the inside of their cage that one will go to town dragging every last square into the corner of the cage to make a nest just like his parents did.  The big one sits on that wheel looking down at his friend working so hard to drag that t.p. around into the corner.  He has no idea why his friend is doing that and he has no inkling to give him a hand.  He just sits back and watches the comical show, as do I.