Health Concerns of Pet Chinchillas

"This is Lauren on behalf of Expert Village and we are talking about some health concerns when it comes to owning and caring for chinchillas. Chinchillas are not a difficult animal to care for, but there is definitely a right and a wrong way to go about things. They do have some sensitivities to be aware of. They are extremely sensitive to stress, to temperature changes, and to noise. And for this reason they are never recommended as pets to children under the age of ten or even as a classroom pet. A stressed chinchilla can lose hair in tufts. They can drop weight. Sometimes they are not very friendly. Loud noises can easily startle them. They usually don't like to be transported. When you need to take a chinchilla on vacation, I recommend putting it in a small carrier, covering it up if you can and putting it in the car and getting it from point A to point B with a towel inside and some hay for them to eat. If it's a long trip, you want to make sure that when you take a rest stop that you have some water available, so that they can drink if they need to. As a general rule, keep it comfortable so that the temperature is somewhere between 62 and about 70 degrees, so that they don't get too warm or too cold. Never leave a water bottle in the carrier that you are transporting them in, because the water bottle will leak and then the towel that they are riding on will get soaked wet. And it is very dangerous actually for a chinchilla to get wet. So you don't want that to happen. For temperature as a rule, like whatever is comfortable to you is going to be comfortable to them. So you want to make sure that it doesn't get too hot where they can suffer from heat stroke or too cold where you can lose your chinchilla that way as well. Stay with us in the next segment where we are going to talk about feeding a chinchilla."