Play Time

Degus like interacting and constantly begin stimulated by their environment.
My Mum has become quite fascinated by ours, but then this is in part because they are an animal you can give 'toys' to.

As part of the bonding process we bought a puppy play pen from ebay as a poster on a Degu forum had some success with theirs in such a thing.
I thought this was a good idea to encourage our Goos to play with us and have much welcome time out of the cage.

Sadly our girls didn't like this.
I can only assume that the confined space and lack of visual stimulation due to the non see through walls was not what they wanted and they spent their time attempting to leap out, climb the walls or just frantically run in the wheel.


They were clearly distressed and it proved a fairly anxious 10 minutes for us.
The fact that they calmed immediately when put back in the cage validated this.



Next I tried to build a huge wooden play pen for them which would allow them to have their cage in the pen so if they felt anxious they could run home.




As you can see this was incredibly sizeable and unwieldy, not to mention that this is our home so practical storage of such a thing was massively inconvenient to us.



Plus it meant lifting the cage in and out all the time and the two of us had to be on hand to 'field' any errant Degu that decided to scale the cage and look to fling themselves off into the rest of the lounge.



Once we had improved the cage set up (see later post) we were able to attach a ramp to the front of the cage linking to the dinning table so they can have the space to run about more and play with us (as a result of the rewire our house was a non Degu safe building site for the best part of a year).



Eventually when I have built their new home I shall be Degu proofing a large run which can be easily attached to the front of their home and extend into the lounge so we can let them out without the need to for such strict supervision.