Now, in the last lesson we mentioned cages and shelves, very important shelves! we are active and love to jump up and down things so a nice shelf or two in the cage gives variety.

Branch mounts are brilliant too, you can chop a nice piece off a tree and 'jam' it into the cage so we can use it as a stepping tool, great to chew on too, so keep supplying us with them! make sure that the branches you use are either beech, willow, pine (untreated) hazelnut or most fruit tree (untreated) except branches from elderberry and bramble bushes - oh and yes, the plum trees! ( yes, I know, but some humans are really dumb when it comes to things like this! )

A water bottle, preferably with a metal 'protector' round the rim like this one, to stop chinnie from chewing the rubber

A hayrack, usually they come 'built in' with most cages which is best as 'loose' ones like these can be fiddly

A food dish, ceramic or clay and stable enough to stand chinnie's romps, attached ones that you can take off to clean are the best

Plenty of chew toys, absolutely essential for teeth, wood and thermal blocks which are cheap to buy are perfect

The Dust bath, a special chinchilla sand (crushed) to keep our fur plush and fluffy - a bath at least 2-3 times a week please!

This is a really short lesson, understandably we have to eat as well as amuse you, so bearing that in mind we come to appreciate whatever is thrown at us, this is FOOD not the TREAT section, treats are mentioned in a later lesson, get that bit right, my owner has heard of some rather silly things that some pet owners give their chinchillas as 'so called' wholesome FOOD! 

Let's start with PELLETS:

Pellets are the essential main diet of chinchillas, rabbit pellets should by all means be avoided as there is 'hormones' in these and will make us fat, fat chinchillas look cute but are not healthy. The pellet should be at around 17% or 18% in protein, so check it out, there is lot's of fancy chinchilla mixes out there but do not have the protein content, and try to avoid 'mixes' as we will just chuck the good pellets out and eat the juicy non protein bits!

PLAIN PELLETS is all we need! anything 'fancier' is called TREAT - get it?

Now for the HAY and/or GRASS:

Good dry, clean hay or grass, a sweet meadow hay or timothy hay is recommended, quality more than type, you can also get 'cubed' or 'block' hay and alfalfa cubes which is excellent to keep the dust down on humans prone to a few sneezes, and we love flinging them around too! You can mix hay with grass or either feed us just hay or just grass, my owner prefers to feed all of us just ®Readigrass and the odd bit of hay occasionally - usually in block form, and the odd alfalfa cube, she says that Readigrass is a slightly higher quality product than hays and is dust free and is not 'messy' to clean out the cages like hay! (If you want to know more about that product and what she feeds us on - then go to the home page and click on the link to the ®Readigrass product)

Well, I think that's it for food, just plain quality pellets and clean water every day with a good handful of hay or grass is all we need to keep us in top form - with the odd occasional treat please!

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