Hello there,
I got my first chinchilla (a little boy called Barley) in December last year. He is almost 11 months old. He's doing very well health wise and is generally a very happy little chinny. However, ever since we got him he has been spending a lot of time hiding whilst he is out of his cage. Basically when we let him out, we have to take our bed apart, because if we don't he just spends the whole time under the bed and It's a struggle to get him back in his cage. So what my boyfriend and I do, is we put the mattress down on the floor and stack the two parts of our bed up against the wall in our room. Barley can spend up to an hour just hiding behind them, staring at the wall or in to space. It seems to be in a strange pattern though, as soon as he gets out he runs straight to hide behind it, plays around for a little while, then spends the rest of the time hiding behind the bed again. Should I be worried about this? I'm desperate to get some more interaction with him and I'm aware that this takes time and a lot of patience, but he still wont allow me to pick him up, so it's always a nightmare to get him back in the cage again. He sits on my lap sometimes and some days he'll sit for ages and let me pet him, but he just seems to spend far too much time hiding. Our room is quite messy, not dirty, just full of things like boxes, clothes and photography equipment (my boyfriend is a photographer) so I'm wondering if the fact that things are quite cluttered is what's causing him to hide a lot of the time. We're in the process of finding a new flat so when we move in to our own place the plan is to keep Barley in the living room, hallway or even a spare room if we're lucky. We currently share with two other people so It's not possible to do so in our current flat. I'm wondering if we have more floor space and less things cluttered about the room that he's in, that it will maybe encourage him to have more interaction with us, as there will be less for him to run and hide behind.
Should I be worried that he's hiding a lot of the time? Or has anyone else experienced this with their chinchilla? I just want to make sure he's happy and not doing this because he feels depressed. He gets out of the cage to run around and play every single night for at least three hours, if not more. So I can't see how he would be doing this because he's unhappy. Just worried about my wee guy!
