This is Rambo. He's my cute little Chinchilla that I rescued in June of this year (2009). I made a couple of posts about him a while back. Long story short, he had a rough life prior to my rescue. He had been caged with another Chinchilla that beat up on him a lot apparently
. His ears have little bite marks out of them in a few spots and he's missing half of his tail. It's pretty obvious that he's had his share of battles. Poor little guy.
Since I've had him, I've tried my best to show him love/good care (given some unforeseen circumstances). I limit him to two raisins per day which I hand feed him. He eats Timothy Hay bricks and Alfalfa Pellets. I try to let him out of his cage daily to run around my room a bit (notice the picture of him sitting on my Wii haha).
After 5 months of care, he still is very skittish and barks/cries/gets scared when I try to handle him or anything. If I can pick him up, he will let me hold him for a few minutes before getting to squirmy. He doesn't bark or anything while I'm holding him. He will let me scratch his chin a little through the bars but, after a few seconds, he runs and barks haha.
I'm mainly making this post to document my plan and progress on my plan. I have started, tonight, clicker training him. The first thing I'm training him to do is take a treat from my hand (not me handing it to him). After that, I plan on teaching him to come to my hand (once he gets to my hand, he gets a treat/click).
Secondly, I want to train him on "play time". I've set an alarm on my phone (10:00PM) that plays a specific "Ding" sound. Eventually, I'm sure he'll pick up on it and get anxious when he hears the alarm.
So far, after just a few clicker exercises, he is starting to come to come to my hand/take the treat more and bark less. Hopefully he'll continue to "come around" as they say.