Lewies Blog

What do you get when you have a 12 year old dream, a pair of pet gerbils, and a paycheck? You get a complex city that grows.

I was explaining to my brother that each section in my little gerbil setup has a function. I do not know if he was amazed or was just thinking that I was crazy, but all in all, I still had fun explaining it to him.

Naturally, gerbils love to burrow. They’ll try and dig deep into a cage - even when they are down to the plastic. To help prevent any mess, I get a generic plastic container. I get mine at PETsMART from Keep-A-Critter Item #60804

I fill it up with fresh pine shavings every weekend. They seem to be very comfortable with it because they spend lots of time digging under all the shavings. It is really easy to clean up. I simply dump it in the trash and haven’t seen any mess left behind. The wood shavings seem to absorb everything.

The newest addition is the sand bath. I went with the Keep-A-Critter container again and filled it up with a container of Kaytee Chinchilla Dust Bath. Gerbils use the sand to clean up like a shower. It’s called a dust bath. It elliminates extra oil and moisture. It is a very fine powder.

The gerbils didn’t take too well to the sand at first. Stewey is constantly in and out of there pushing the powder around. Ying doesn’t seem to be too worried about his hygene just yet.

The next part are the individual gerbil cages. I got two small Critter Tail cages mainly because … they were cheaper and when I started out, I thought it would be nicer for them to have two rooms rather then one big cage.

The smaller of the two cages (Critter Trail Mini One) is the feeding cage. Each day I throw out what is left and give them two teaspoons of food. They seem to understand it is food time when I’m holding the yellow dish. This is also the sleeping cage where I introduce all of the bedding. When I go to sleep at night, I will usually seperate this small cage from the city and replace the connecting tube with the original small water bottle. Then the cage sets in a spare bedroom over-night.

Above the smaller cage is a lookout tower. This tower is used often as the restroom. It is by far the most disguisting smelly item to clean out of all the cages. I’ve put litter up there, but they always move the litter out.

The larger of the two cages (Critter Trail Mini Two) was originally the gym. It came with a wheel, but it was too small and the gerbils wouldn’t use it. For a while, I had there old wheel in from the old Critter Trail Three cage. It bent the bars a little and I found myself removing it too often due to how wobbly and noisy it was. These days, this room is where they get there water, and where they have a little wooden hide away. Also, I place alfalfa from a mini-bale in there every couple of days.

The last and final part of this system is the tubing. The tubes alone can count as there own room and seem to be the most exciting part for the gerbils. Every few days, I connect the tubes up in a different way and afterwards, these guys spend about one or two hours just running through them forwards, backwards, and into each other. As time goes on, I continue to buy more tubes. Today, I was able to finally get enough tubes so that they can have more then one path to reach the same destination. They went crazy.

My gerbils have this problem of excessive knawing. I showed my brother all of the plastic shavings covering the surface where the cages are. I explained to him that it wasn’t litter, but from the inside of the tubes. These guys have so many things to knaw on, but it would appear that they prefer the plastic.

I buy them wooden homes ever few weeks that they hide in at first, but eventually knaw through. I got a container filled with Hamsteroids that they like. These things are like rocks. They’ll knaw on them at first, but get bored of them easily. I have wooden blocks, wooden vegies, and wooden toys all for them to knaw on. They prefer the plastic. They even knaw on the sides of there plastic dish and it is beat up bad.

I read that excessive knawing is due to either a poor selection of things to knaw on, or a need to escape out of boredom. So as a gerbil owner, I’m continuing to try and make there life exciting. This is the reason why I have so many accessories.

Tags: Gerbil, Dust Bath, Fun, Hobby, Pets, City, Petsmart, Critter Trail, Gnawing, Burrow, Hygene

This entry was posted on Sunday, May 15th, 2005 at 2:15 am and is filed under Entertainment, Friends and Family, Life. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.