Berry eating from his food bowl
While loosing Berry is another blow for our family, I can say that he passed away peacefully from old age. A few days ago we noticed we were seeing less of him, and then yesterday he just wasn’t himself and we knew we were going to lose him. While it made us very sad to know he was going to leave us, with all the upset and illness we’ve been through with our rats, seeing Berry slipping away peacefully at a good age did give us some comfort.
I have been a bit remiss in updating about Berry since he first joined our family. It’s hard to believe he has been with us over two years now and, I’m pleased to say, is still going strong.
Things have changed a lot in our relationship with Berry since we first got him. He is still prone to bite given half the chance, the worst times are when Derek is trying to pick up berry’s food bowl, to feed him. If he hasn’t checked where Berry is before hand the little devil will come launching out of nowhere and give Derek a good chomp, usually resulting in spilt gerbil food. Having said that, Berry does love being hand-fed sunflowers, though again if we’re not paying attention he will bite our fingers if the chance presents itself. I know that makes Berry sound a bit mean, but he’s not really, he is very sweet just a bit confused and we do love him very much.
After our precious Cheddar passed away we had decided not to get anymore gerbils. Because we love to interact with our little family members we weren’t sure if we could keep up with another pair of young gerbils. Baby gerbils are incredibly fast and sitting on the floor with them is not as enjoyable as it was 10 years ago :-).
We had put Cheddar’s old cage in the loft, just in case, which turned out to be a very fortunate move after a trip to the pet store to get a bunny cage, we came home with Berry. The pet superstore we visited ran their own rehoming scheme and when we saw the cute little black gerbil curled up all by himself we just could not resist. Berry is six months old and his previous parents had just dumped him in a cardboard box outside the pet store, and he was looking for a new family.
I’m sorry to say our amazing little gerbil Cheddar passed away peacefully. When I say amazing I really do mean it. Since the end of last year, Cheddar had been having problems with his teeth. His front top teeth had just stopped growing, but his bottom ones had not. This gave us two problems the first was that he needed to have his bottom teeth clipped regularly by our vet and the second was that he could not eat normal gerbil food. We love Cheddar very, very much so we got into a nightly routine of breaking up his gerbil food into small bite sized pieces for him.
Chive
We have been having a rough couple of months with our gorgeous little gerbils. It started back in December when we noticed that Cheddar was having problems eating, he had also lost some weight. We were not to concerned by his weight loss as Cheddar was always the chunkier of the brothers. But when we noticed he was having real problems eating we took him straight to our vets who had a look at his teeth for him. We found that his top teeth were almost non-existent and his bottom teeth had grown quite long because there was nothing for them to wear against. Our vets are very good with small animals and the vet expertly clipped Cheddars bottom teeth to prevent them becoming a problem for him.
After the amazing experience of Barley and her sisters, we had decided to take a break from gerbils. We had done very well sticking to our resolution until we popped into our local pet shop for some supplies. No trip to the pet store would be complete without a little look at the baby animals, what harm can it do? There was a sign on one of the animal tanks that read ‘Male gerbils, six months old. Please ask a member of staff’, so we did. Their original owner had found them a handful, anyone who knows happy healthy gerbils will understand what they meant, so they had returned them to the pet shop, which is far better that leaving them in a corner and ignoring them. We were given the gerbils for free, which made them even harder to refuse.
Millie and Syrup
Sadly both of our two remaining gerbils have passed away. Old age caught up with them and they both slowed down, we first noticed the amount of cardboard they were getting through had decreased. Then the time they wanted to spend out of their cage grew shorter. Our precious little Millie died on March 18 and little Syrup passed away a few weeks later on April 4. At just over three and a half years in age, they were both a very special pair of gerbils. We are really going to miss them.
After all the fun we had with our four little girls we made the difficult decision not to have any more gerbils for a while. Barley, Rogue, Syrup and Millie are going to be a hard act to follow, we really do miss them.
It has been three months since we lost little Barley and our two remaining gerbils are keeping us very busy. At first it was quiet a shock for Millie and Syrup, Barley had been the leader of our little gang and it was quite an adjustment just being the two of them. Millie and Syrup have coped very well with all the changes, they spend far more time together than they had before, we very rarely see one of them alone.
Our sweet little Barley has died. Last week before she had been taken ill with a respiratory infection, we took her straight to the vets and got her some medicine. Barley was very brave trying to join in with her sisters when they came out to play, but she was very, very poorly. It became obvious Barley was not going to recover so we made the difficult decision to take her back to the vets.
Derek had a look today and he saw a second little tooth poking through. Barley is going to be back at her old chomping ways very soon, and we can’t wait.