Toys and Accessories : Navigation
This is not a complete list of what is available or required in the way of toys and accessories for chinchillas. I would recommend having as many toys as possible available for your chinchilla, though not necessarily in the cage at the same time to avoid crowding. This will help keep your pet occupied when you are not around to provide entertainment. If you do not allow your chin outside the cage for regular exercise sessions or provide toys he/she will soon become bored and frustrated. This can have major consequences as the chin will become stressed leading to "caged animal syndrome" i.e. repetitive action such as running back ward and forward along a shelf, fur biting etc.
These are all methods of removing any possibility of boredom while you are away from your pet. Avoid toys made from plastic, this can be toxic to chinchillas if they swallow large amounts of it.
Firstly, avoid exercise balls, and DON'T use the wheels you will find in your local pet shop, they are LETHAL !!! They may make perfect sense when you stand there in the pet shop trying to find suitable toys to keep your favourite fur ball happy, but trust me, they are not. They will make it harder for him/her to escape, and easier for you to find them in the room and ultimately catch them to put them back in their cage at the end of the play session, but spend your money on something more useful......like another chin !!! The forward momentum of the ball makes it impossible for the chinchilla to stop, so what you think is a happy pet running round your room is in fact a very frightened animal that is probably overheating and having it's back bent into a very uncomfortable position due to the cramped space within these balls. Imaging what a chinchilla would do when confronted with a flight of stair under normal conditions, it would easily hop from stair to stair, in a playball it would bounce all the way to the bottom resulting very likely in a very dead chinchilla. NEED I SAY ANY MORE TO MAKE MY POINT ?
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Cardboard Rolls (carpet or toilet rolls)