The old days of chins in college...

[Spoof]

Susan mentioned this in another thread, what a great topic!!

This is an invitation for those of you that had chins in college to share some of the fun (or scary) times.

I've been out of college for a wee bit now, but when I started the only information came from that pet store chinchilla book and the people you bought the chinchilla from.

I don't get too flustered by 'terrible housing conditions' because I've done it, been in it or rescued from it at some point.

I started with a chin in late 1998 or 99. He came in a 40 gallon glass aquarium. Over the next three years I housed and bred chins in aquariums.

I eventually quit using them because I couldn't lift them by myself. I started building cages out of tupperware, then eventually pine as I got the tools. I loved the pine ones. Between that first chin and the end of college (2003) I moved 9 times and had between 20 and 60 chinchillas. How did we move them? Oh we'd put them in their cages in the back of an open pickup and off we went.

Overall I had some awesome roommates to put up with me and a few not so cool ones. The end of 2003 is when I met Ronda, got serious about breeding and showing and started using runs. I had my first case of fungus in 2005, it sucked. Had my first adult death in 2005 too. I've often thought it was odd that through all the stupid stuff I did in school I never had any issues, but when I got smarter about my caging/feeding I started having problems.

Food for thought.

Anyhow, here are my scary pictures;
#1 Friend that had chins, they loved to watch her cook. They had a lot of crap in their house.
#2 Many of you have seen this picture, did you guess that there was a 50 gallon tank behind that chin?
#3 My tank setup in 2002
#4 I'd gone away from the tanks and was building smaller wire and tupperware cages (and using bird cages)
#5 This was an awesome roommate, I have 37 chins hidden in this house - and she's managed to hide most of them decoratively!
#6 Yup, there's one behind the T.V., my last tank
#7 Some of the pine cages I built.

 

[Spoof]

Awww, it cut me off at #4.

Here's the rest.

 

[EveningChin]

Wow! Thats actually really fun. I like how you showed your past, its so cool to see some of those pictures.

As a college student with Chins and roommates... the combination is hilarious sometimes isn't it?

 

[AZChins]

I don't think I even have pictures from way back when. I may have some from 12 years ago when we lived in an apartment. 10 years ago we HAD to buy a house because we needed more room for the little guys.

 

[Spoof]

Oh, I spotted something in #3 that I just have to share. If you look closely at the wire cage there is a CD being used as a washer. My friends would save their AOL CD's and give them to me for this reason. There were lots back then, got at least one a week and raided the AOL box at the post office many times.

 

[AZChins]

Now that is just crazy...

 

[Remyma0408]

No pictures, and not college related, but my first chin was also housed in a small aquarium, until he got bigger and I decided he needed something better. She was also kept in my walk in closet, door open of course.... but still pretty hot I'd imagine!

 

[arf2184]

By college, I had a better idea of what I was doing. My follies came in high school.

I got my 1st chin Rhoda in 1997 when I was in 8th grade. She was a gift from my aunt who at the time bred chinchillas (not a good breeder). I used my savings from babysitting to buy a new cage ($35...still have it, great price for a decent cage) and a book on chins (still have it...not worth the paper its printed on). Rhoda died in August of 1998. No clue why. She was fine when I went to bed, but stiff when I woke up.

Chins number 2-9 came in September 1998 (4 males, 2 females, 3 kits...one kit wasn't right and died shortly after arrival). I was given a bunch of rabbit cages with them (1"x2" wire spacing). Needles to say, the babies escaped a few times. Some of the cage didn't have pans or the pans had rusted through so I threw them out. I made replacement cardboard trays lined with trash bags to keep them from getting urine soaked...it worked for a bit until the chins figured out they could chew on them then eventually chewed through them. Mom and I hunted garage sales for new cages and I ended up with quite a variety.

From there, the chins were fed lots of raisins, pellets, hay, apples, carrots, sweet potatoes, etc. I had two breeding pairs and a bunch of boys. Babies were sold to a local mom and pop pet store for $35 each. I was able to learn some online at school and at the library, but it wasn't until 2000 that I really took off.

In 2000, we got our first computer and good ole' dial up AOL...lol. Having access to all the information really helped a lot. I found a ton of websites (many of them worse than the books I had read, but some quite informative), a Yahoo group and eventually C-n-Q. I made a lot of changes, got some quality chins, got into showing a bit, and the rest is history.

No pictures to share...they were all on film or floppy disk. If we even have the disks anymore, I'd have to set up one of the older computers (that has a floppy drive) to look at them.

 

[AZChins]

Alison, I tried to find old pictures on floppies and couldn't find them either. Oh well.. I wish I had a picture of my old basement...that was such an awesome place for the chins.

One thing is for sure, I have had a lot of fun with chinchillas over the last 12 years. Being in college with the chins around was the best. I always had something more important to do than school work. Just kidding. I miss the days where I only had a few chins, it didn't take two hours every night to get them all fed and settled for the night.

 

[6Dusters]

I so enjoyed those pictures. Sometimes I think my chin room looks crazy too. Oh for the love of a basement. ( sighs ) Next house!!

 

[chin_gal]

haha, I love it! I wish more people would admit the way they used to keep chins before they got to the forums, but I doubt that will ever happen. Great pictures. )

 

[tunes]

I kept mine in <gasp> super pet cages! With PLASTIC shelves!

They didn't have wheels in their cages. They didn't have 12 hammocks and 30 leap'n ledges. They didn't have a different toy for each day of the week that I would rotate out so they didn't get bored. Then again, they don't now either.

I'm not saying there's anything at all wrong with it if that's the way you do things, but I think a lot of people don't mention their earlier set ups because a lot of pet folk would get very up in arms about chins being abused or neglected. I know Tara isn't getting the response she was expecting, are you Tara? <snort>

 

[Stackie]

Well I got my first chin as a senior in high school, which wasn't all too long ago. I kept him in a little superpet cage with no shelves, just a hidey house, with one of those salt lick things and food with raisins and bananas. Thankfully the internet had already been invented *snicker* and I found out I was doing things wrong rather quickly.

Love the cd being used as a washer. That's hilarious. How resourceful college students can be when it comes to saving money....

 

[chin_gal]

*gasp*, here it goes!

This isn't really a college story, lol, but it still applies. I got my first chinchilla when I was 10 (yes, 10 years ago!). My dad got her for me, and her name was Lucy. At first she was kept in a 2'x2'x2' wire cage, and then she was moved to a larger ferret cage when I got her brother (my recently departed Schroeder) from my dad since they no longer wanted him. We seperated the ferret cage in two, Schroeder on the bottom and Lucy on top (yes, I know this was horrible) and kept them that way. Must not has been too bad though, Schroeder lived until 13 and never had to go to the vet until this past May when I had to get him PTS. I fed them different foods each month, because my mom also picked up whatever kind of rodent food was on sale (she rarely actually bought chinchilla food for whatever reason), and they got hay only occassionally as a "treat". They got loads of sunmaid fruits that we bought in a mixed variety pack, along with different kinds of nuts and seeds. The only thing I did wrong that actually had a huge effect was the ferret cage. The floor spacing was 1"x.5" and Lucy got her foot stuck, and that's how I lost my first girl. This was about 3 years later, however. It wasn't until I was 14 that I found this site. I couldn't believe everything I was doing wrong, but I've eventually forgiven myself believing that at the age of 10, my mother should have been the one to know what she was doing.

Whew, feels a little better. I see nothing wrong with admitting what you used to do, especially if you've fixed things now. Not everyone's perfect.

attached is a picture of my Lucy. I don't really have many of her, and this one was removed from a short movie clip I have of her.

Edit: Something else I forgot to add is that I didn't have AC. Somehow they survived 80+ degree temps in the house with nothing but a fan (yes, I actually thought that would help...) Like Tara said, it's amazing how so many things can be done wrong, and most of the time they pull out ok. Guess it's luck.

 

[addictedtochins]

AOL Cd's?...I'm so old that when I was in college my chin ran on my record player and played my 33-1/3 Donny Osmond records. :laughitup:

 

[AZChins]

I still have a box of old AOL floppies that I used because I used to use floppies for everything. It's sad because....I used them until maybe nine months ago when my husband insisted I get new computer things.

I have a record player somewhere around here. My parents had Osmond records...it may have been Donny Osmond. Who knows... I wonder where all those records ended up...

 

[lsknc]

i got my first back in 2001.i had just started highschool. i cant believe how much has changed since the first. i kept my first in a home made cage but upgraded to the ferret kingdom by superpet. that didnt last long because my chin would chew the connecters off and would escape all the time. went from various cages since then. but now i have custom breeding runs and normal breeding runs for the kids. i did find some old pictures of when i used to have them in the room with me. all i had in there was my bed and kept my clothes in the closet. that was when i had about 12 at the most. now i have all my chins in a building!

 

[AZChins]

Wow Kayla. It doesn't look like there was much room for Kayla stuff in your room back then.

 

[lsknc]

nope. i had to move all my book shelves (and there was quite of few of them) into a different part of the house. it was like that for a while. the worst part was when i had to dust. oh the things we do for our chinchillas.

 

[Spoof]

Wow, you really packed them in! One of the places I lived ended up so full of cages I built a bed over the stairwell so I had a place to sleep. Yours looks very tidy for having that many!

In 2000, we got our first computer and good ole' dial up AOL...lol

Amazing how much AOL inadvertently helped chin addicts, who knew they'd be so useful? lol.