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Post by paperdoves on Aug 9, 2014 15:42:52 GMT -8
My baby gerbils are a couple of weeks old now. Their eyes are open and they are about half the size of their parents. They crawl around the cage but spend most of their time in the nest.
I want to end up with optimally tame and friendly gerbils, and in particular one of them I am definitely keeping for sure.
We've been handling them a little bit in the tank, and some of them crawl onto your hand and stay on it (as does their dad) voluntarily.
When can I remove a baby from the tank, maybe even to a different room, and handle them for brief periods? This would be done extremely carefully, like sitting in the middle of my bed and holding them just barely off of the bed. Or letting them explore the blanket a bit (it's a big bed, no danger of suddenly falling off) under close supervision? I mean supervision of the baby itself, there would not be any children involved in this handling.
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Post by crittercrazy on Aug 10, 2014 19:02:30 GMT -8
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Post by ashtree93 on Aug 11, 2014 0:33:40 GMT -8
I've had two litters and I have handled the pups from the day of birth with no issues from mum (she looks so relieved to have a few minutes without them) or any impact on pup health.
I personally just take them out the tank once a day and put them on my bed. It's 1m distance, but when they're eyes are open, they like to jump!!! You will need to have a good hold on them as dropping them can seriously injury or kill them. I then just let them run around and explore on the bed and me. When they curl up and nest in my hand, I pop them back.
I've found that the pups definately get used to be handled a lot quicker than new gerbils.
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Post by paperdoves on Aug 12, 2014 10:37:07 GMT -8
Thank you. I have been handling them a lot but only over the tank. When I do this, they grind their teeth at me and make little chirping sounds and the dad runs around trying to figure out how to get them back down there. I did take one of them out of the tank and into my bedroom for some good pics under natural light (they normally live in my son's bedroom. It's a bit cave like in there) and it seemed to go fine. But the next day I found both parents running all around digging up the tank, they seemed to be looking for something rather frantically. Upon further investigation, I couldn't find the baby that I had taken the pictures of. So I put the parents and the babies that I could find, into a bin and started basically combing the tank for the missing baby.
I found her, she felt cold and was barely moving. She had been about an inch beneath the nest. I think that she dug herself down and couldn't figure out how to get back up. At any rate, I put the rest of the gerbils back and gave the cold baby to the parents. They just ran around for a minute, so I left figuring that it was better to let them figure it out. I really did not think that she was going to make it. But now she is totally fine, I am so relieved.
Is there any chance that the parents had rejected her because she smelled too strongly of human? The parents are hand tame and friendly. I really hope that this was not the case, that my first theory (that she dug herself down accidentally) is what happened. I would like to handle them more, but now I'm leery.
On another note, the babies are SO CUTE. They look like little balls of fluff running around. One of the black ones likes to dig already, and the dove one likes to stand on her hind feet and lift her little front feet up to look around. It's really adorable.
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Post by Shooting Star on Aug 12, 2014 18:12:34 GMT -8
Once their eyes are open, they won't really die if the parents just reject them. They are at least nibbling solid food by that point, so unless the parents attack them, if they die, you can assume they were sick.
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