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[pippaaaax]

I have been wondering if I should be giving my chins any sort extra vitamins like vitamin c or any of these immune system boosters etc? I feed them a good brand of chinchilla pellets, timothy hay and then sometimes a rose hip or goji berry. Any help from anyone is welcome Thank you!

[kageri]

No, good plain pellets (no stuff mixed in) and good grass hay is all they need.  The pellets have the vitamins and minerals.  You will just be overdosing them.

[Lori Ramsey Earle]

There are some reputable folks that feel chins should have supplemental vitamin C to help prevent malocclusion. I didn't do it with my chins, but I think it would be worthwhile to read up on this(chincare.com is a good source of info on this). Also worth considering is supplemental calcium, particularly in regards to pregnant chins. One, it helps prevent mom from having calcium seizures, and two, the kits are less likely to be born calcium deficient(in turn making them less likely candidates for future dental problems). For non pregnant chins, feeding some alfalfa hay along with your grass  hay would give supplemental calcium. For pregnant chins, I started feeding yogurt every day, and continued it until the kits were weaned. I started doing this when one of my pregnant chins started having calcium seizures a month before her due date. My vet treated her, and I started supplementing her with the yogurt, and she was fine. No probs with delivery, or nursing.

[LYChinchillas]

Lori - yogurt! That's really interesting; I can see how it would work. What kind did you feed her - I assume plain non-Greek? Just curious

[Lori Ramsey Earle]

I fed my chins raspberry yogurt and they totally adored it. I used the highest quality I could find at the time, which was usually Alta Dena. The positive thing of course was the calcium content and acidophilus. The negative was the sugar content, but I never did see any problems come from that. If I were to start a chin on yogurt now, I'd use plain, low fat and see how that went. I had chins for over 20 years(our colony finally died out naturally about four years ago) and I did experiment with a few different dietary things, particularly with my chins that became ill, had dental problems, etc. For supplementing, the yogurt and a soy protein mix with spirulina were very helpful and I used them a lot in liquid food mixes with pellets and hay. This was intuitive on my part, but did seem to help chins that were under the weather.
The chin that I mentioned in the earlier post was given Neocalglucon by my vet, then I gave her yogurt til her kits weaned. She had one other pregnancy after that - I started her on yogurt as soon as I figured out she was pregnant, and she had no problems with seizures, delivery or nursing.

[kageri]

Excess calcium to non pregnant chins can result in bladder/kidney stones and joint issues.  Calcium is harder to excrete than water soluble vit c so stresses the body more to keep things balanced.  You can't really overdose on the water soluble vitamins like c.  Not so with calcium.  Calcium supplementation during pregnancy should be done carefully because raising the dose at the wrong time can cause the body to go in to storage mode instead of using calcium for the fetus.  The calcium system is quite complicated.

Dairy is highly controversial.  Herbivores did not evolve to eat dairy or animal products beyond a very young age and even then young born fully capable like chins and guinea pigs have a very weak milk without most of the fats, proteins, and sugars that you find in cow milk.  No animal digests certain sugars like lactose but these are a lot less in yogurt than in plain milk.  You still have several fats they wouldn't normally encounter, the calcium, and often a fair amount of sugar.  The most expensive yogurt may not be the best yogurt.  If you use yogurt (some have nearly killed their small animal with it) you want the lowest sugar stuff possible.  Preferably not flavored.  Overall chinchillas enjoy just about any food in existence.  There is pretty much nothing they won't take bites of and probably try to run away with so that's not really a good indicator of whether it's a good part of their diet.

[Lori Ramsey Earle]

I didn't mean to imply that I gave yogurt to my non-pregnant chins, though I can see how you might have interpreted that from my prior post. And the supplementing(for pregnancy/weaning) was for a finite period. At that time, I tried to get my hands on every bit of info concerning chinchilla health, but I never came across anything that warned of the trickiness of timing calcium supplementation with pregnant chins. Where were you able to find this info? Information like that is so valuable, and scarce(or at least it used to be) and members here that currently have chins could benefit from knowing where to access it.
Healthy chins don't need anything more than good quality chow, super fresh hay and water. I think everybody here agrees on that. The supplementing I did was to help chins that had special  needs(mainly malocclusion, and pregnancy). It was never done in a cavalier fashion. The yogurt I  used was not the most expensive, it was the best quality, which to me meant more active cultures. The fecal droppings of the supplemented pregnant moms remained very plump and healthy, so there didn't appear to be digestive issues with the yogurt. The amount given was about 6 cc's, I have no idea how one might kill an animal with yogurt, but they must have given huge amounts. But I'm not trying to be a poster child for feeding a mama chin yogurt. I was trying to share something that worked for my chins and seemed to help keep calcium staggers at bay.

[kageri]

Using too much and too high of sugar yogurt has thrown off the digestive tract of all sorts of rodents.  I can't count the emails and forum conversations I've had that involving someone's rodent (gerbil, hamster, guinea pig, chinchilla...) suffering life threatening digestive problems from giving yogurt.

There was a big long calcium discussion by some vet students on another forum.  I will see if I can find it.  I don't remember the details because I don't supplement calcium most of the time and never alone.  I have some Manu blocks.  They are a south american clay with a natural balance of minerals, there are fake versions out there to watch for, but I don't generally use them.  When buying supplements you want to watch for salt content.  Chins do not handle excess salt and have gone in to seizures.

[kageri]

cross posted with permission

Hey everyone,
As some of you know I have been going to college to study Veterinary medicine for the last two years. I have completed animal anatomy and physiology one and two, pharmacology, exotic animal studies, animal med and surgery, clinical pathology, parasitology, lab technology, radiology, nutrition, and more.

Something that has been a topic that comes up over and over is the improper supplementing of calcium in breeding female animals. Most commonly seen in rabbits, dogs, and cattle. This can lead to a condition often called "milk fever" in cattle.

To understand how to properly supplement calcium one must understand how calcium is controlled in the body. For sake of time and understanding I will greatly simplify this process for you.

Calcium is always present in the body. Depending on the level of calcium the blood animals do one of two things. If calcium in the blood is higher then the demand the body will start one process. Calcium will be drawn from the blood and laid down into bone resulting in a reduction of calcium avaliblity in the blood. Reversely if blood calcium level is low the body will change to a process of pulling calcium from the rest of the body into the blood for use in muscle contraction and other calcium requiring activities. These two processes are the body's means of maintaining homeostasis. It takes multiple days to get the body to switch from one process to the other. During birth an animal should be in the "pulling process". All excess calcium needs to be pulled into the blood so it is available for muscle contraction and lactation. If the body is in the process of laying down calcium and pulling it out of the blood at this time the effect can be bad.

So how does this apply. Well when you know a doe will soon be kindling it is often thought to be a good idea give her more calcium (calf manna, tums, etc) around a week before birth. This is one of the worse thing you can do. She will acquire a large amount of calcium in her blood and her body will start the process of pulling the new influx of calcium out of the blood stream and into the bones making it less available then if calcium was never supplemented in the first place. This is not to say that a doe will not need more calcium during pregnancy and kindling but it should not be given at this time. The ideal is to give an animal calcium during the middle 2/4 of pregnancy. This will allow the doe to lay down more calcium in her body and in her kits' body. Then in the last 1/4 of pregnancy all calcium supplements should be withdrawn! This will allow the animal to change its internal processes from pulling calcium out of the blood to pulling calcium in. If problems arise during labor it is then okay to supplement calcium again since it takes a few days to change processes in the body. Giving calcium during birth will not be enough to cause the body to draw calcium out of the blood again. The after kindling calcium can gradually be increased to meet the increase demand of calcium for milk production. But you need to be careful not to increase over the rising demand or you will cause your doe to pull calcium out of the blood again. Kinda a complicated cycle!

Most of the rest of the thread details were specifically about rabbits and due to their high calcium diets in the first place probably does not apply.  In short it was questioned if the body might be pulling calcium from the bones too slowly to have enough for labor when the diet has been high in alfalfa the entire time.