Who has a pet Degu? not for sale just to compare?

Question

Hi,

I was wonderin how many ppl have pet Degus as i know they are not common. What are urs called? Do they know any tricks? Do the respond to their name? Do they like being handle? What do u think the pros and cons are?

Answer 1

i have degus. 3 brothers. their names are attila (the goo), chubby cheeks, and joseph. heh. attila is the one that destroys stuff, chubby has more pronounced cheeks and joseph is shy. mine don't know any tricks but they do know to come when called. chubby likes playtime and attila loves it. joseph accepts it but it has to be on HIS terms. attila loves to jump on to my shirt from the cage and sit on my shoulder or head and drive me around. hehe. we also play hide and seek in my room since it's "degu proofed". uhm, the only real cons i've found personally are that degus destroy EVERYTHING. mine are in a huge martin's cage with covered floors. but yeah their cage had best be metal or you'll need a new one soon. other than that i don't think there's anything else that is bad. they are REALLY smart, pretty easy to tame, extremely cute. and i have guinea pigs too so i just feed them the piggie food. they eat zupreem guinea pig food and a mix of orchard and timothy hay. i love how they have to take their chew sticks and make piles like a challenge. and they are really cute in their bath house. whenever my brother would come in my room attila would run up to him and scream at him. and my brother would be like "hi tila" and he'd be all "eeek eek eeeek" hahaha. then he'd run up to me for chin scritches. they're adorable sleeping too. and they are small animals with VERY big personalities. oh and their squeaking when they play box sounds like birds and mine love to play box and then cuddle. hehe. they all sleep in a little line on one leapin' ledge. but my favorite thing about them is besides how funny and cute they are, they mount for dominance. and when done with that they bark. for the longest time like three to five minutes and they stand like angry little dogs while doing it. they are adorable.

Answer 2

At one time I had 4 Degus. The first set were babies that I acquired from Petco. The Petco employees had no clue what they were or how to take care of them. I gave them tons of information and in turn, they gave me a pair. One boy and one girl (Elvis and Priscilla). I had already agreed to take another pair from some friends of ours... another male and another female (Gunther and Olga). Gunther and Olga were huge. All the research that I had done on them said that they were very clean animals... using the bathroom in one corner or using litter/sand, etc. This is not true (at least in my experience). I housed them in an aquarium with a metal climbing cage add on up top. They would go up to the very top and urinate, which would get all over the floor and run down the wall. I cleaned their cage everyday and it still smelled horrible. When I would give them sand for their baths, they would fling sand everywhere ... but it was very cute :). Elvis and Olga would bite whenever you tried to get near them. Gunther would run and hide. They all fought with each other (not play fighting either). Priscilla was the best one. I could take her out and she would run around my desk, chewing on pencils, and playing with paper. I was going to get rid of the others and just keep Priscilla but was told that they had to be kept in pairs. So I got rid of all of them after about 6 months of trying to socialize them. Maybe if I had only started out with the two babies, it wouldn't have been as bad. But that's my experience, maybe yours will be different. Good luck.

Answer 3

my dad breeds degus, i am very very fond of them, but dont have one myself.