Freshness of Pelleted Food / Food Choices Part 2

...continued from the previous day.

So, moving onto pelleted food choices. 

There's a variety of good, quality, pelleted foods out there.  What you feed may depend on the choices available to you.

The top foods we would recommend would be Tradition (Hubbard Life Chinchilla), Mazuri Chinchilla, and Oxbow Essentials Chinchilla.  Note that I have the word "top" in there.  There's plenty of other good ones -- MannaPro Rabbit Chow, Nutrena Rabbit, Blue Seal Extruded Rabbit Pellets.  Probably some others.  The thing is, what you basically want in a chinchilla pellet is a compressed pellet made of mostly hay, with no fruits / veggies / other things in there.  This seems hard for a lot of companies to accomplish, as a quick search for chinchilla pellets tend to result in the most colorful, unhealthy foods for chinchillas, ever.  You want a plain-pellet, junk / fruit / veggie / seed / nut - free chinchilla food.  That is it.  Aside from that, the choice is yours.

So, we use Tradition.  It comes in big 50 pound bags, if you read the previous post, you know one of those lasts us about 2-3 days... we blow through it.  Those 50 pound bags are roughly $20 or so, depending where you go.  The dealer is slightly less expensive, but my feed store can order it (at more like $24-25?) if I run out.  Let's go with $20/bag.  So, let's assume I use 2-3 50-pound bags per week.  That's 8-12 bags per month, or in a year (52 weeks), 104-156 bags of food.  That comes out to 5,200-7,800 pounds of chin chow a year.  Anyway, we're talking about cost here... at $20 a bag, 104-156 bags a year comes out to $2,080-$3,120 just in chinchilla feed.

Don't forget, we also have shavings, laundry (for the cages with fleece liners), hay, etc etc, to pay for.  Plus the big one -- utilities.  Air conditioning, year-round, is expensive.

Not saying that $2-3k is expensive, it's just a number, let's compare.  You can buy Oxbow chinchilla food at the pet store for about $15 for 3 pounds.  So, in looking back at those 5,200-7,800 pounds per year, we'd need 1,733-2,600 of those little 3 pound bags of chinchilla chow.  At $15/bag... we'd be looking at $25,995-$39,000 to feed our herd Oxbow.  Yikes.

Ok, you say, but surely you can find Oxbow in larger quantities.  Well sure... but nowhere that I can pick it up.  I'd have to ship it in.  Which isn't the end of the world, but it adds the variable of shipping, and the whole "will it get here when I need it?" factor.  But just for example, I can find Oxbow chinchilla online, in 25 pound bags for $33.  With those bags, we'd be looking at 208-312 bags per year, at a cost of $6,864-$10,296.  That's about 3x our current cost of Tradition.

As rescue isn't exactly profitable (more like the opposite), and breeding isn't far behind if you do it right (paying the bills is nice... but I won't be buying a new vehicle anytime soon), I can't afford anything going up by 3x the cost.  We've had awesome luck on Tradition, it's been used for 50+ years by many of the large ranchers, and it was developed by one of the large ranchers and has been tweaked over the years, as necessary.  We can get it in regularly, and have no problems with it... we will be staying with it.

However... I do realize it is not the choice for everyone.  As I mentioned, it does come in 50 pound bags.  Do you have one chinchilla?  That maaaay be overkill.  It will start losing nutrients long before you ever use it up.  So, if you get a chinchilla that is being fed Tradition and want to keep that chinchilla on that food, your options (well, pretty much only option) is to buy from someone who buys it in large quantities and sells it.  We sell it for $0.75 per pound, for example.  However, if you're not close by, this may mean having it shipped to you, and as mentioned, there's always a risk of running out and not being able to run out to the store to get it.... so I get where people may chose Oxbow Essentials or another good chinchilla food.  If you only have one chin, you can run out to the store once a month and pick it up, and it's (hopefully) there for you when you need it.

One last note on food -- a lot of people have commented over the years that pet-store food is expensive... no doubt... so let me compare pricing for a minute for you.  Let's say you get Oxbow from the store.  Chins eat approx. 2-3 pounds per month, so let's say, factoring in waste, that that's 3 pounds a month, which is one Oxbow bag per month.  12 months x 1 bag / month x $15 / bag = $180 per year on the pelleted food.  That's for 36 pounds, just for reference.  Let's compare that to getting food here... let's say you're close enough and can come pick up the food, so no shipping necessary.  Tradition at $0.75 / pound x 36 pounds = $27.  Quite the difference, eh?  Ok, let's say you're not close and you do need it shipped... we normally ship 11 pounds in a flat rate box, but can fit as much as 15 per box if we really cram it... either way, you're figuring 3 boxes to accumulate 36-ish pounds.  Each box is $23.  So $23 / box x 3 boxes (this is including shipping) = $69 (for it to arrive on your doorstep).  So... it doesn't have to be super expensive... just depends on the choice you make.