Nights at the Chinchilla Rescue: Winx

I couldn't tell you what started it, but I'm having a really hard time today that Winx is gone. There's chins in his cage, but the setup hasn't changed. The name card on the cage still has his name, and I'm pretty positive he's still listed on my website as a current chin. But he's gone. If you read this blog with any regularity, you know he died back in December, after several days of going downhill for no particular reason. He was my baby. I got him back in 2003 and he made it a full 11 years through several moves with me. He was your typical chin, never really did like me, but I loved him to death.

I bought Winx from a pet store in Terre Haute, IN when I went away for college. My friend Tiffany had gone there with me, not looking for a chinchilla, but we saw him and had to hold him. We returned the next day to take him home.

He was here when I got Moki, because I wanted him to have a friend. He was here when I got Toby and Bailey because I thought mosaics were such a neat color. He was here when I got the Crazy Critters herd of chinchillas and started showing. He was housed with Moki, and eventually Toby, until Toby beat him up, and both chins were caged separately. When Moki died, I let him sniff her and say his goodbyes, before she was taken to be cremated. When I moved to all ferret nations (and one critter nation) for rescue cages, he got prime real estate in the top of one of them. He would have had the entire cage, but he had a hard time hanging onto weight, and I didn't want him expending it all and exhausting himself to death. He would've had a buddy, but he got to the point where he didn't even want a kit with him, so he was left by himself in the cage.

He went to the vet numerous times as he got older. He just kept dropping weight, despite eating. Once they found he had teeth spurs, and filed the teeth down. That time it helped, but closer to the end, they couldn't find anything wrong. They filed his teeth down anyway, because there was nothing else they could do, but it didn't do anything. Everything was normal on his bloodwork. The x-rays were normal.

I bought him all sorts of supplements from all sorts of places. He was on an immune booster, an appetite stimulant, some general ones, and a big push in me making the NWI supplement was so that he would have something he would actually eat. He really did like those supplements. But he was still losing weight despite eating those and eating his own food.

When Shindig came around in August 2014, and offered chin painting, I took him with me. He was already weaker than I would have liked, but he did the painting with me. That would be the last time he would leave home.

The day before Christmas, I was tending to the chins, and noticed something seemed off with him. I opened the cage and he took a flying leap out. I returned him to his cage, but something wasn't quite right. He spent that night upstairs in my room, but I felt bad that he wasn't in his own cage, so I returned him back downstairs. He spent the next few days laying around the cage, with me doting on him, and finally passed in his hanging cube / bed that he loved so much on December 27, 2014.

An impression of Winx's pawprints were taken, a necklace pendant was made from his DNA, and he was cremated.