If you are looking for a pet who will delight you all the time, consider bringing a chinchilla. Their appearance in the first place will delight you because they are sweet-looking, innocent and tiny animals that have soft fur, so, they are adorable to touch too. Plus, they show amazing behaviors so as to relieve all your stress after a hectic day. In short, a chinchilla can be your best friend and companion. Here are some interesting facts about chinchillas that will give you reasons why you should bring this animal home as a pet.
Chinchilla is known to have the softest fur of all land mammals. In fact, chinchillas were hunted not for their meat, but for their fur. Their fur is very thick and each follicle in their skin grows 50-80 hair strands, while follicles in humans’ skin grow only 2-3 hair strands.
The teeth of your chinchilla will never stop growing and may even grow as big as 12 inches per year. Hence, you should give things safe to gnaw to your chinchilla to make sure they don’t get hurt by gnawing on dangerous objects. You should also make sure he doesn’t gnaw furniture and electrical cords and hurt himself seriously or even get killed.
A very adorable and amusing behavior of chinchillas is their dust baths. Yes, they clean themselves with dust and not water. The reason for this is that their fur is extra thick and cannot totally dry out. With dust baths, they clean oils and dirt from their skin. It’s like using a dry shampoo. During their dust bath, they roll in the dust playfully which is amazing to look at. You can get full information on how to take care of chinchillas including how to dust bath them on chinchillacaregroup.com. Don’t forget to read it.
The whiskers of chinchillas are their organs for ‘seeing’. Even though the eyes of chinchillas are quite big and attractive, they are actually underdeveloped and don’t enable chinchillas to see with them. Instead their long whiskers which are as lengthened as half their body’s length help them ‘see’ and feel surrounding things.
Your chinchilla will be awake at nights and asleep in the days. Therefore you should take care of placing his cage in a quiet place that won’t receive direct sunlight, so that he can get a quiet sleep.
Chinchillas are highly sensitive to heat as well as humidity. Therefore, in their natural home, it’s cool and dry. So, you should keep the temperature around them between 15 degrees Celsius and 25 degrees Celsius.
All in all, by bringing a chinchilla home, you are going to have a great friend that will keep you happy always.