Baby chin injury

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T

theandigirl

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This morning started wonderfully with a new single baby chin in the cage :) My male and female have been together a year, and this is their first baby.

A few hours later the little one was doing well and trying to climb the cage bars. Suddenly my cat ran up and bit off the babies back foot!!! It was horrible. We went to the vet and the rest of the leg was amputated and sutured.

The baby seems to be doing well and is hoping around. I have removed the male, put the cage in a room no kitties can get to, and have removed all the levels from the cage. The problem is that the mom doesn't seem to want to let the little one nurse!!! It has been several hours, and when the baby gets close she just hops away! HELP!!

I dont want to bottle feed if there is hope still for the mom.
 
The baby smells like vet, anesthetic, and medications. Mom is rejecting her because she is not familiar to her. Grab a handful of shavings (if you use them) and rub them all over her body (the kits) being VERY careful not to let any of it touch the leg. If you don't have shavings, rub the kit all over dad, all over mom, and then try putting them back together. If she is in an unfamiliar cage, put her back in the one she was in to begin with. If she is on shavings, get her off of them and put down either fleece or paper towels to keep the leg from getting infected and more damaged than it already is.

If that doesn't work, and mom is still rejecting the kit, you will have no choice but to hand feed. Hopefully after a couple days mom will pick back up again, but you have to be prepared to feed that kit every 2 hours around the clock, 24/7, until she's 3-4 weeks old.

Cats and chins do not mix. You need to keep your chins completely separate from your cats from here on out. I am also wondering about the spacing of the wire on your cage. Unless the spacing is huge, which is not kit safe, I am not picturing how the kit could have gotten half it's foot bitten off. Baby safe is 1/2 x 1 inch in size openings, no larger.
 
Thank you for the reply.... I did the shavings trick already. Trying to not disturb them at all, but I check every hour or so and they arent near eachother. The cage has very narrow bars, my breeder approved it. The baby was sticking the tip of its foot out and the kitty grabbed it and pulled :( My cat usually is fine with the chins and for the last year has even hung out with them....the baby i think is too mouse-like.

I was wondering about hanging a water-bottle of formula low as a supplement type feeding. Has anyone had any luck with that?
 
I have not had good luck with that personally. I prefer to just hand feed with a syringe and formula for the best results.
 
What type of formula have u had the best luck with? KMR? Also if I feed, can I still leave her in with mom??
 
Update....I just went to check one last time before bed and the little one is bottoms up under mom!!! Here is hoping that this is a good sign for the two fo them. I will begin weighing the little one tmw. If anyone has been through any of this with a baby before or knows how adults do with only one rear leg...I'd love to hear. Thank you all for ur posts! (Fingers crossed)
 
This is the part where people think I'm insensitive and cruel, but didn't you research hand feeding before putting a male and female together?

I've always used baby powder on babies that I foster out and have had very good luck with that. No matter what you put on the baby the smell of the vet will not be covered to a mother chin. Plus the fact that the baby is now "defective", and that this is her first kit I'm guessing ( you said they'd been together for a year and first litter ) she's a new mom and isn't a pro at this yet. Paired with the instinct to abandon a injury or odd smelling kit to prevent attracting predators, she might take the kit eventually, but if I were you I'd plan on hand feeding.
The kit needs to be feed, a bottle wont work because they learn to drink from mom. They will not go out searching for it, like an adult chin with water. Along with hand feeding you need to keep her warm, if mom won't do it, you might have to put her with dad. Also you need to clean her butt to help stimulate her bowel movements, which you do with a warm damp paper towel ( unless of course you have a spare tongue ).
 
( unless of course you have a spare tongue ).
Sorry but this did make me giggle. :hilarious:


Bottle feeding kits is not a quick fix solution - it takes time & effort to get a kit used to drinking from the bottle because, as Riven pointed out, kits will not go searching for a bottle. Getting a kit to feed from a bottle can take days but it does work very well once they get the hang of it. The key is patience - getting the kit used to putting some effort into licking the ball bearing - it is a different thing to suckling & has to be "taught".
IME bottle feeding is a very good technique for "independent" kits but it does not work for all kits & I definitely don't think it is suitable for this kit at this stage.


I would suspect that the kit needs hourly feeding for the next 24 hours or so - it will be in pain & most likely shocked.
 
Riven.... OK so yes I researched it, but many different sources have different info. This is NOT this momma first go around. This is her first with this male. I am NOT an idiot....Chin mommas dont tend to reject babies very easily, and my girl is a good mom. I am a veterinary technician with 14 years of experience in hand raising all kind of wildlife (squirrels, ferrets, kittens, etc) I just though I would go to a place with people more experienced in chins or who may have had a similar experience for extra guidance.....my mistake
 
Hopefully, now you've got that off your chest we can move on?
Riven's questions & comments are actually quite reasonable considering your first post ......... if you genuinely want help with your kit then you've come to the right place but you'll get straight answers & they may not always be what you want to hear.


How is the kit doing now? Is she feeding?


Chins do very well on 3 legs - if the amputation happens when they are kits then they know no better & just adapt. Most tripods zoom about like lunatics & you'd never know they were missing a limb. Sometimes a cage needs a bit of minor adjustments like an extra ledge or so but other than that they are just like "normal" chins.
 
Chin mommas dont tend to reject babies very easily,

Just to clarify, actually, yes they do. I have between 100 and 150 babies a year and moms will reject them for the oddest reasons. Sometimes they just don't want them. Maybe they it was a hard labor and they are worn out, so they push the baby away; maybe the baby was injured during delivery and they push it away; maybe there are three and mom can only handle two so she ends up pushing all of them away. It's good that the baby is nursing, but still be on guard for mom to reject him/her. They are animals. They don't reason and you can't reason for them. It is what it is.

As far as tripods, yes, as Claire said, they do just fine. I have had several tripods here and they definitely don't let it slow them down.
 
i know there are several members who already have tripods and have experience with them, so if you are considering adoption, I am sure there will be takers here.

hope everything works out for you.
 
Here's where I jump in to tell you about MY 2-legged chin, Little Two Paws Shakur!!!

He has only 2 legs, both on the right side!!! He was born with nothing on the front left and what I call his "nubbin" on the back left.

When my rancher friend told me that he only had 2 legs and asked if I would take him, I asked, "How does he get around???. After careful consideration, he replied, "Well, pretty good, I reckon".

And he DOES!!! He skitters about so fast you can't believe it. I have said many times before and I will repeat it here once again, animals are so much more accepting of their circumstances. He doesn't KNOW that he should have 4 legs -- he uses what he has been given and does quite nicely.

He is a pampered pet and well loved, not only by me, but also by his fans on this forum and CnF!!! I keep him in a 1 level guinea pig cage that is completely fleece covered, since his nubbin is very easily irritated. He has a cuddle cup, a low ledge covered with a fleece pillow, a fleece tube on the floor, a low hammock and a fleece corner bed. He uses each of these in succesion to get up to his fleece corner house. We have playtime on a flannel sheet on my bed.

Don't worry about your little guy -- he'll be fine and will make a fine pet. He can even be shown, since the number of legs has no bearing on his status. Ears, tails and feet are not considered -- just the main body for fur quality.
 
hey if you can get used to feeding and the baby makes it, you will have a VERY special bond to him. I have a baby that came from a petstore where the people were actually stupid enough to put multiple unrelated chins, up to 4 of them, in a wire cage and have a WIRE RAT WHEEL in it. Well guess what happened? Little Elmer, ( one of the chins) was a baby and the others didnt like him for whatever reason, he got jammed and stuck with his foot in the wire wheel. THEN the foot was completely severed, and the hip bone was actually splintered out and showing where it should connect to the hip. His foot was dead, and he was left that way for three days. I offered to try to cut it6 off because I couldnt stad it they wouldnt take him to a vet.

SO, I cut it off, I amputated him. I used n antibiotic and metacalf everyday and now he is great!! He iis a little smaller than most would be because his energy went into repairing his leg, but you would NEVER KNOW. He is also very very bonded to me, but he doesnt accept any other chins, nd he is aggressive to babies especially, and I think this is from his experience.

It is worth it to do what you can to help him.
 
First, this post is a month old. So posting information to it now is too late.

Second, please do not come on here and tell people that you are amputating limbs on chinchillas willy nilly. You are NOT a vet. I can't even imagine the pain that chin must have felt. If you "couldn't stand that they wouldn't take it to the vet" then you could have stepped up to the plate to do it for them. Posting on a primarily pet forum that you whacked off a baby chins leg because someone was too cheap to take it to the vet is a sure way to make this thread absolutely explode.

MetaCAM would not even have begun to touch the pain of having a leg clipped off. He needed anesthesia.
 
Do not use KMR, that is for cats, i was nursing two baby kits and you need to use 1 can of Goats Milk , 1 can of water, and 1 table spoon of baby rice cereal, and your not going to use it all in one feeding so pour it into an ice tray and freeze it. The formula needs to be room temperature not hot and not cold . And do not put the syringe directly in the kits mouth squirt a drop on there lip and let them lick it off and your first few times feeding you will be lucky to get a few drops , it will get the trick after awhile, especially if it's not getting it's mother's milk.


What type of formula have u had the best luck with? KMR? Also if I feed, can I still leave her in with mom??
 
Wow. Yeah, metacam isn't really an anesthesia. I'm hoping that the chin is alright. I'd take a chin like that to my vet for an amputation, most likely. Not just because I am not a competent surgeon and I hate the sight of blood, but also because the vet has the proper equipment and anesthesia....chins really should be knocked out for such a procedure and xrays may have been a good idea. Poor little guy...
 
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