Thursday, November 16, 2017

Playtime At Young Ages

I feel like I can't stress this enough -- chinchillas should not have playtime before 6 months.  Even at 6 months, they need to start with 10 minutes per day, and slowly work up to 30 minutes per day, by the time they are a year old.

I actually have a handout that talks about this.  I hand it out to anyone adopting chins under 1 year old, and it's even on the website.  It's called Do's & Don'ts for Young Chins, and it's here -- http://www.nwichinchillas.com/do-s-don-ts-young-chins

Now, while it's available, of course, I can't make people read it or maybe a better way to put it, comprehend it.  I had a chin go home with someone the other day, and she emailed me this morning about some odd behavior.  Turns out, the chin was being let out for 2-3 hours of playtime a night... the first few nights, she ran around like a spaz, but then started slowing down, wanting to sleep more, having red ears... and so on.  So the owner emailed me.

Off the top of my head, I remember thinking it was a young chin, but I wasn't positive, so I looked up the birthdate of the one she adopted -- 4/15/17.  The chin is 6-7 months old.  So... as you readers should know just from what I've said in the last few paragraphs, 2-3 hours per day is much too much.

So I emailed her back, sent her the link to the info about playtime, and explained this all to her.

The main thing with this is -- if you were running a marathon, you wouldn't go run 26 miles on your first day of training.  Even if you somehow physically could accomplish this on the first day of training, you would be so worn out and so weak afterwards, you could seriously hurt yourself.  That's how this is.  The chins start at smaller periods of time and work their way up, so they develop stamina.  Also, so they have time to grow, and as they get larger and have larger amounts of food in their stomachs, they can spend more time out.  What we want to avoid is having the chin basically use up all the nutrients they have in their bodies, running around.  If that happens, they can go low blood sugar, become lethargic, and possibly even die.  Sad to say, it happened to someone we know a few years back... which is one of the things that prompted me to write that handout.  Obviously, we want our chins and everyone's chins to live as long and as happy lives as they can, so living through baby-hood is always a good thing and a good step in the right direction.  So, I just wanted to put this out here to remind everyone how important it is to either not do playtime at all (which is fine.... chins do just fine without it), or work on gradually introducing playtime into the lives of our young furry fluffballs.  That is all. 

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