ShannonLee
Chinny Slave
I've been perusing these forums for a few months now, and finally decided to become a member. My name is Shannon, and I am a 22 year old psychology graduate living on the east coast of Florida. The story of how I ended up with my furry children is somewhat interesting...
There is a pet store in my hometown that I visited as a child, and they were known for carrying very exotic animals, like sloths, lemurs, various monkeys... And when you're 10 years old, that seems pretty cool! But as I got older, I realized that was pretty messed up, especially when I heard that they don't check for proper licensing for exotics or care for many of the animals properly. In December of 2009, I somehow ended up visiting the shop with a friend of mine. We were wandering around the small animal section, when I noticed a grey ball of fur in a 17*17 inch cage. There were no houses, toys, or chews in the enclosure, and it was about 90 degrees in the store (that's Florida in December...).
I asked one of the staff members about the animal, and she explained it was a chinchilla. She knew nothing else about it, except that she was instructed to give it a dust bath every TWO months. The animal did not look good, and I could not leave her there. So that's how I ended up with Leeloo, a hetero beige with very spotted ears.
So I bought Leeloo the biggest cage I could find (love my FN double unit!), tons of toys, made shelving and all kinds of stuff! She is fairly antisocial, but she loves belly scritchies.
Then last October, I was contacted by a lifelong friend who was heading off to college. His landlord was very strict about no animals, and he had seen everything I did for Leeloo and thought I would be the best person to adopt his chinnie. Thus I inherited Rocky, a coincidently male hetero beige, and the single most friendly animal I have ever met. I put a divider between the two levels of the FN to keep the two apart. The cage would be... OK... for two, but I wasn't happy about the new lack of space.
Flash forward to this April. My boyfriend and I left town for the weekend, and when we came back, Rocky was not in his cage. Uh oh. I looked down in Leeloo's cage, and there they were, curled up on one of the shelves. Rocky had chewed through the divider. Yikes. I really had not intended for that to happen, but from my reading, the odds seemed slim that Leeloo would conceive in such a short amount of time. So they were reseparated, and I monitored Leeloo very closely for the next few months. 118 days later arrived little Eevee, a beautiful homozygous beige girl... here she is at a week old. She has the telltale blueish ring in her eyes, and nearly white fur.
Eevee is now a month old, and she is huge! Here is the video we took for her month-old birthday. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n0SH5T-OMUA&feature=youtu.be
So, plans for the near future... With the addition of a third, I bought a second FN from Craigslist, with the intention of pulling the side panels from the two and making a massive cage. Of course, Rocky will need to be fixed first, and Eevee will need to not be able to squeeze out of the FN bars (I had to baby-proof before she showed up). I will be converting them to fleece liners that I sewed, and adding a bunch of new stuff that I sewed and will be constructing from wood. I'm a big DIYer, so hopefully I can contribute some ideas while I'm doing these projects.
This forum has actually helped me a lot, from reading while Leeloo was pregnant to ideas for toys and crafts. I'm glad that I will be able to engage in conversations now too.
Anyway, that's the story of Leeloo, Rocky, and Eevee. See you around the forum!
There is a pet store in my hometown that I visited as a child, and they were known for carrying very exotic animals, like sloths, lemurs, various monkeys... And when you're 10 years old, that seems pretty cool! But as I got older, I realized that was pretty messed up, especially when I heard that they don't check for proper licensing for exotics or care for many of the animals properly. In December of 2009, I somehow ended up visiting the shop with a friend of mine. We were wandering around the small animal section, when I noticed a grey ball of fur in a 17*17 inch cage. There were no houses, toys, or chews in the enclosure, and it was about 90 degrees in the store (that's Florida in December...).
I asked one of the staff members about the animal, and she explained it was a chinchilla. She knew nothing else about it, except that she was instructed to give it a dust bath every TWO months. The animal did not look good, and I could not leave her there. So that's how I ended up with Leeloo, a hetero beige with very spotted ears.
So I bought Leeloo the biggest cage I could find (love my FN double unit!), tons of toys, made shelving and all kinds of stuff! She is fairly antisocial, but she loves belly scritchies.
Then last October, I was contacted by a lifelong friend who was heading off to college. His landlord was very strict about no animals, and he had seen everything I did for Leeloo and thought I would be the best person to adopt his chinnie. Thus I inherited Rocky, a coincidently male hetero beige, and the single most friendly animal I have ever met. I put a divider between the two levels of the FN to keep the two apart. The cage would be... OK... for two, but I wasn't happy about the new lack of space.
Flash forward to this April. My boyfriend and I left town for the weekend, and when we came back, Rocky was not in his cage. Uh oh. I looked down in Leeloo's cage, and there they were, curled up on one of the shelves. Rocky had chewed through the divider. Yikes. I really had not intended for that to happen, but from my reading, the odds seemed slim that Leeloo would conceive in such a short amount of time. So they were reseparated, and I monitored Leeloo very closely for the next few months. 118 days later arrived little Eevee, a beautiful homozygous beige girl... here she is at a week old. She has the telltale blueish ring in her eyes, and nearly white fur.
Eevee is now a month old, and she is huge! Here is the video we took for her month-old birthday. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n0SH5T-OMUA&feature=youtu.be
So, plans for the near future... With the addition of a third, I bought a second FN from Craigslist, with the intention of pulling the side panels from the two and making a massive cage. Of course, Rocky will need to be fixed first, and Eevee will need to not be able to squeeze out of the FN bars (I had to baby-proof before she showed up). I will be converting them to fleece liners that I sewed, and adding a bunch of new stuff that I sewed and will be constructing from wood. I'm a big DIYer, so hopefully I can contribute some ideas while I'm doing these projects.
This forum has actually helped me a lot, from reading while Leeloo was pregnant to ideas for toys and crafts. I'm glad that I will be able to engage in conversations now too.
Anyway, that's the story of Leeloo, Rocky, and Eevee. See you around the forum!
