Post by theia on Jun 22, 2015 6:12:59 GMT -8
Since our accident with Sanza that left Crystal alone and as she got very quickly depressed, we decided to get her a friend. I'm going to basically write up our whole adventure with trying to get her a friend here as hopefully somebody will learn something useful from it as I most certainly have done.
We went a very risky route at first as the only place that had any females only had three sibling girls and we don't like splitting them up, so we bought the girls and gave it a try. At first it looked good with Crystal sleeping next to the divide within 2 hours of the split being set up, and the next morning Isis and Nia were sleeping on the other side of the divide to her, unfortunately Mia the biggest of the three did not like Crystal at all (note the sisters were supposedly about 8 weeks old, so I was hoping that they didn't have a hierarchy established yet, but it seems they very much did). Mia would full on attack the mesh whenever Crystal was near and it didn't get any better by the time a little over a week had passed. I found a little blood in the bedding on one side and decided it just wasn't worth the risk to Crystal or to the established sisters that they might end up declanning over this attempt, so I bought a new cage and moved all three of them out. Although I believed that Isis or Nia could have potentially been taken from the three and split to Crystal by that point we believed the damage had been done and that Crystal would associate their smells badly, it also wasn't worth risking having the split fail and then having to either try splitting the single sister back to her sisters or having her alone too.
So I went to all the pet shops I could and found 1 female in the Adoption centre, I would have taken her home that day but she had managed to hurt her nose (attacking a kopak pod) and so they had to isolate her for 2 weeks until she had recovered from the injury and they were sure there was no further issues with her. (In hind sight this was probably a very good thing as the two weeks that Crystal was alone would have helped her get over her trial with Mia). Things went much better with these two, from the start they were much more curious about each other and only mild aggression if any at all (I now believe the 'agression I thought I saw was more a warning signal from Crystal probably due to the previous split making her more nervous). We tried them together after a week, however they ended up is a death ball within 5 or 10 minutes, Crystal suffered two neck bites and Silver one tail bite (and my husband was bitten right through his thumb by Crystal when separating them... oops). We now attribute this to several causes,
1 - Silver was still very new to our home and is a very timid girl, though she has got much better she is still qutie timid, in the beginning if you so much as looked at her she would run away and this almost always resulted in her flinging herself off whatever piece of furniture she was on
2 - we didn't ry to introduce them inside the cage, our previous successful split with Sanza and Crystal we had managed by introducing them on neutral ground and so we tried this method again, however I think that neutral ground was far scarier for Silver than the cage and so she reacted badly when presenetd with a new gerbil in her face
3 - I had read that if a split isn't successful within 3 weeks then it will never work, so we probably rushed it a bit and tried way before either was ready, i.e. Silver was too timid and new still and Crystal was probably still traumatised by the memory of Mia's aggression.
So, we put them back into the split after taking care of their injuries. We waited until their injuries were well healed before trying again, this time at around the 3 week mark (again thinking we only had three weeks in which to successfully do this or it would fail completely). This time we tried to introduce them inside the cage, we took out anything that would get in the way of us trying to split them up if they ended up in a ball again and moved the cage where we could easily reach in to do so, and added toilet roll tubes and sprinkled lots of different treats around to keep them distracted and happy. They lasted 15 minutes this time before my husband had to separate them (with the newly purchased thick gloves that whilst they wouldn't stop a bite would certainly reduce how badly he would get bitten). He said they had started to ball up again (I couldn't see well enough from my vantage point) and managed to pull them apart before any damage was done. This time I think the factors involved were that Silver still wasn't as relaxed and happy here as she could have been, we probably agitated them a bit by moving their cage and then almost immediately pulling out the mesh as well as them being on the floor which would make them feel more vulnerable (they always gets scared if their cage is on the floor and we walk about).
Back into the split again and I'm feeling kind of defeated. I do more research into how long splits can take and find that some people report taking a much longer time than 3 weeks to successfully do one. I decide that next time we try will be the last as it's too stressful on both us and the girls (in this case they'd live in a permanent split as they get on fairly well and I don't see them ever harming each other). So we start waiting for more signs that they're ready to try again, from the beginning they have been sleeping in each others beds but never next to each other/the mesh, they've been pushing their noses through to investigate each other and I am pretty sure I've seen a good few grooming attempts from both parties. Over the next almost 3 months their behaviour still doesn't change for better or worse, Crystal still claws through the bars and Silver spends almost all her time trying to dig and chew through the mesh. We have a couple of weekends away so I prolong the third and final attempt until we know we will be home for a good long time. This brings us up to yesterday, when I decide we have a whole day to give it another go and keep an eye on them if it starts going well, and that their behaviour isn't changing anyway so we may as well try. The things I did differently this time are: I set their cage up in front of us on a stool, so they are not on the floor, I emptied their cage out and got everything ready a good half hour befoe we actually started the attempt so that they weren't moved and then immediately introduced and they could get used to the cage being somewhere new. I had a pot available to attempt to split them up with if they ended up in a ball so as to save our fingers from bites. It all went so much better, there was a lot of frightened hopping away when Silver came up to Crystal, and also a lot of 'clawing' where Crystal would push at Silver to get her out of her face and then she would start sniffing her face and start trying to groom her, they slept in the opposite corners the first time they slept, but the second time Crystal found Silver sleeping (rather than the other way round which resulted in Crystal waking up and insta-grooming Silver), she did a little grooming of Silver and then curled up next to her, by the time I needed to put their cage away they were sleeping head to tail in a large cardboard tube and it was a lovely sight to see, I'd have taken photos but my phone was dead and I didn't want to disturb them. The amount of grooming that occured yesterday was rediculous, Crystal groomed Silver pretty much every 15 to 30 minutes and would only allow Silver to groom her if she was safely huddled in one of the cardboard tubes. About 15 to 30 mintues in to the introduction I realised that we might have been affectng them by ourselves being super stressed and afraid that they might ball up any minute, so we consciously made ourselves relax and I think I did see an almost immediate improvement in how they were acting. As time went by I slowly returned their cage bits to them (wire and wooden levels) so they could climb around more, but I did make sure to give them only one thing back every couple of hours or so, so that they didn't get overwhelmed by each other exploring and getting active again. I also stopped switching them three times a day about 4 days before this attempt and started switching them just the once, I've no idea if this helped or not but after 3 months they should have been pretty used to each others smells by now and they stopped scent marking months ago so the reduced stress of having to catch and swap them so many times for both me and them may have made them happier with each other??? or maybe not???
We are so happy it finally worked, I need to get some pics of them curled up together at some point, there is a pic of Crystal in my sig but I have yet to update it and add Silver in as well (Silver is a CP Agouti and there are some pics of her in my post in Members Photos - Members Gerbils page 7 if you're curious). I am truly ecstatic right now, I just wanted Crystal to have a friend again (she utterly sucks at making beds and often just sleeps on the bare floor or just on top of the bedding, Silver however is an excellent bedmaker so now I know Crystal will always be warm and comfy lol), and I also wanted to give Silver a good life as she was given up at the young age of 16 weeks by someone and she was all alone in the pet shop and so very timid I have no idea what could have caused her to be this way. I have high hopes that Silver having someone to comfort her and to run to when she gets scared will give her a small boost in confidence too. And if in the process we went from wanting one cage with 3 gerbils in it to having 2 cages with a total of 5 gerbils in them, then so be it
If you read all of this then virtual cookies to you, hopefully some of the things I've learned will be helpful to someone else out there too. Also Betty if you read this, you are awesome, many of the tips and info I found that helped us were from your posts on here!
We went a very risky route at first as the only place that had any females only had three sibling girls and we don't like splitting them up, so we bought the girls and gave it a try. At first it looked good with Crystal sleeping next to the divide within 2 hours of the split being set up, and the next morning Isis and Nia were sleeping on the other side of the divide to her, unfortunately Mia the biggest of the three did not like Crystal at all (note the sisters were supposedly about 8 weeks old, so I was hoping that they didn't have a hierarchy established yet, but it seems they very much did). Mia would full on attack the mesh whenever Crystal was near and it didn't get any better by the time a little over a week had passed. I found a little blood in the bedding on one side and decided it just wasn't worth the risk to Crystal or to the established sisters that they might end up declanning over this attempt, so I bought a new cage and moved all three of them out. Although I believed that Isis or Nia could have potentially been taken from the three and split to Crystal by that point we believed the damage had been done and that Crystal would associate their smells badly, it also wasn't worth risking having the split fail and then having to either try splitting the single sister back to her sisters or having her alone too.
So I went to all the pet shops I could and found 1 female in the Adoption centre, I would have taken her home that day but she had managed to hurt her nose (attacking a kopak pod) and so they had to isolate her for 2 weeks until she had recovered from the injury and they were sure there was no further issues with her. (In hind sight this was probably a very good thing as the two weeks that Crystal was alone would have helped her get over her trial with Mia). Things went much better with these two, from the start they were much more curious about each other and only mild aggression if any at all (I now believe the 'agression I thought I saw was more a warning signal from Crystal probably due to the previous split making her more nervous). We tried them together after a week, however they ended up is a death ball within 5 or 10 minutes, Crystal suffered two neck bites and Silver one tail bite (and my husband was bitten right through his thumb by Crystal when separating them... oops). We now attribute this to several causes,
1 - Silver was still very new to our home and is a very timid girl, though she has got much better she is still qutie timid, in the beginning if you so much as looked at her she would run away and this almost always resulted in her flinging herself off whatever piece of furniture she was on
2 - we didn't ry to introduce them inside the cage, our previous successful split with Sanza and Crystal we had managed by introducing them on neutral ground and so we tried this method again, however I think that neutral ground was far scarier for Silver than the cage and so she reacted badly when presenetd with a new gerbil in her face
3 - I had read that if a split isn't successful within 3 weeks then it will never work, so we probably rushed it a bit and tried way before either was ready, i.e. Silver was too timid and new still and Crystal was probably still traumatised by the memory of Mia's aggression.
So, we put them back into the split after taking care of their injuries. We waited until their injuries were well healed before trying again, this time at around the 3 week mark (again thinking we only had three weeks in which to successfully do this or it would fail completely). This time we tried to introduce them inside the cage, we took out anything that would get in the way of us trying to split them up if they ended up in a ball again and moved the cage where we could easily reach in to do so, and added toilet roll tubes and sprinkled lots of different treats around to keep them distracted and happy. They lasted 15 minutes this time before my husband had to separate them (with the newly purchased thick gloves that whilst they wouldn't stop a bite would certainly reduce how badly he would get bitten). He said they had started to ball up again (I couldn't see well enough from my vantage point) and managed to pull them apart before any damage was done. This time I think the factors involved were that Silver still wasn't as relaxed and happy here as she could have been, we probably agitated them a bit by moving their cage and then almost immediately pulling out the mesh as well as them being on the floor which would make them feel more vulnerable (they always gets scared if their cage is on the floor and we walk about).
Back into the split again and I'm feeling kind of defeated. I do more research into how long splits can take and find that some people report taking a much longer time than 3 weeks to successfully do one. I decide that next time we try will be the last as it's too stressful on both us and the girls (in this case they'd live in a permanent split as they get on fairly well and I don't see them ever harming each other). So we start waiting for more signs that they're ready to try again, from the beginning they have been sleeping in each others beds but never next to each other/the mesh, they've been pushing their noses through to investigate each other and I am pretty sure I've seen a good few grooming attempts from both parties. Over the next almost 3 months their behaviour still doesn't change for better or worse, Crystal still claws through the bars and Silver spends almost all her time trying to dig and chew through the mesh. We have a couple of weekends away so I prolong the third and final attempt until we know we will be home for a good long time. This brings us up to yesterday, when I decide we have a whole day to give it another go and keep an eye on them if it starts going well, and that their behaviour isn't changing anyway so we may as well try. The things I did differently this time are: I set their cage up in front of us on a stool, so they are not on the floor, I emptied their cage out and got everything ready a good half hour befoe we actually started the attempt so that they weren't moved and then immediately introduced and they could get used to the cage being somewhere new. I had a pot available to attempt to split them up with if they ended up in a ball so as to save our fingers from bites. It all went so much better, there was a lot of frightened hopping away when Silver came up to Crystal, and also a lot of 'clawing' where Crystal would push at Silver to get her out of her face and then she would start sniffing her face and start trying to groom her, they slept in the opposite corners the first time they slept, but the second time Crystal found Silver sleeping (rather than the other way round which resulted in Crystal waking up and insta-grooming Silver), she did a little grooming of Silver and then curled up next to her, by the time I needed to put their cage away they were sleeping head to tail in a large cardboard tube and it was a lovely sight to see, I'd have taken photos but my phone was dead and I didn't want to disturb them. The amount of grooming that occured yesterday was rediculous, Crystal groomed Silver pretty much every 15 to 30 minutes and would only allow Silver to groom her if she was safely huddled in one of the cardboard tubes. About 15 to 30 mintues in to the introduction I realised that we might have been affectng them by ourselves being super stressed and afraid that they might ball up any minute, so we consciously made ourselves relax and I think I did see an almost immediate improvement in how they were acting. As time went by I slowly returned their cage bits to them (wire and wooden levels) so they could climb around more, but I did make sure to give them only one thing back every couple of hours or so, so that they didn't get overwhelmed by each other exploring and getting active again. I also stopped switching them three times a day about 4 days before this attempt and started switching them just the once, I've no idea if this helped or not but after 3 months they should have been pretty used to each others smells by now and they stopped scent marking months ago so the reduced stress of having to catch and swap them so many times for both me and them may have made them happier with each other??? or maybe not???
We are so happy it finally worked, I need to get some pics of them curled up together at some point, there is a pic of Crystal in my sig but I have yet to update it and add Silver in as well (Silver is a CP Agouti and there are some pics of her in my post in Members Photos - Members Gerbils page 7 if you're curious). I am truly ecstatic right now, I just wanted Crystal to have a friend again (she utterly sucks at making beds and often just sleeps on the bare floor or just on top of the bedding, Silver however is an excellent bedmaker so now I know Crystal will always be warm and comfy lol), and I also wanted to give Silver a good life as she was given up at the young age of 16 weeks by someone and she was all alone in the pet shop and so very timid I have no idea what could have caused her to be this way. I have high hopes that Silver having someone to comfort her and to run to when she gets scared will give her a small boost in confidence too. And if in the process we went from wanting one cage with 3 gerbils in it to having 2 cages with a total of 5 gerbils in them, then so be it
If you read all of this then virtual cookies to you, hopefully some of the things I've learned will be helpful to someone else out there too. Also Betty if you read this, you are awesome, many of the tips and info I found that helped us were from your posts on here!
