How to keep your Chinchilla active and engaged

Keep your chinchilla happy and stimulated with toys and enrichment activities. Many ways to make your chinchilla's life interesting require minimal time and effort. Twist and tie their hay into a knot, and your chinchilla will carry it away to eat. Provide them with dry sticks that haven’t been exposed to pesticides or herbicides. Hide small pieces of dried fruits in their bedding. You can also purchase interactive toys, grass balls, and wooden wheels for them. Offer multiple levels in the cage for them to explore. Change things up by rearranging the cage ledges, removing a toy for a week, and then reintroducing it. Spray the toy with a bit of carrot or apple juice. A toy that’s been absent for a week will seem new again, keeping your chinchilla intensely interested and engaged. Spend time with your chinchilla and allow them supervised floor time (you can always catch them with their bath). Chinchillas are sweet, curious engaging little animals.

Interactive enrichment toy

Chinchillas are crepuscular rodents native to the high Andes mountains. Being crepuscular means they are most active during the twilight hours, when their natural predators are either waking up or going to sleep. Their predators include the Andean Mountain Cat, the Harpy Eagle, and the South American Fox. Chinchillas live in herds that can range in size from 14 to 100 animals.

In their natural habitat, high in the Andes Mountains, life is hard. Survival is a struggle. Water is sparse and food is poor. Chinchillas eat the dry fiberous grass, leaves, bark and the occasional fruit or insect. Chinchillas spend a good deal of their time activly searching for resorces.

In captivity your pet chinchilla is given chinchilla pellets, timothy hay and many treats. They don't need to spend all of their time in the struggle to survive. However, they still need both physical and mental stimulation. If your chinchilla is bored or stressed they can develope self destructive behaviors. The may chew on their cages, causing dental issues, chew fur, either their own or their cage mates. The can develope anxiety and depression.

Chinchillas are rodents, this means they have rootless inscisors that never stop growing. They have a need to chew, they explore their envorment with their hands and their mouths. If your chinchilla lacks appropriate items to chew their inscisors will become overgrown causing discomfort and eventually death by starvation. A veternarian can trim your chinchillas teeth if necessary.

Chinchillas have the densest fur of any mammal alive today, with up to 50 hairs growing from each folical and an amazing 20,000 hairs per square centimeter. This makes chinchilla fur a luxury item, it takes approximatly 150 chinchilla skins to make a fur coat. Chinchillas in the wild are CITES listed and critically endangered. There are however, many many captive bred chinchillas that are legal to own. Of the two subspieces of chinchilla the one most likly found in our homes are the Long-Tailed Chinchilla.

Curious, Engaged and Engaging