Small Animal Bedding

[Buffy]

Anyone who keeps small animals Cavies Rabbits etc, what bedding
do you use?, I used to use Megazorb but have found a pellet bedding
which is like cat litter, it is not dusty, and very absorbent, it is
made of recycled paper, the manufacturer is Fibrecycle.

 

[fluttermoth]

I'm old school; wood chippings and hay for my rabbit, guinea pigs and chinchilla

 

[DERANGED C0W]

For my hedgehog I used to use CareFresh bedding, and then aspen shavings. Now I just use fleece, it works really well. It's soft on their feet and easy to clean, just throw it in the washing machine.

 

[phoenixgsd]

i have chinnies too fluttermoth i use favings too, i know your not supposed to use wood shavings because of respiratory issues, but in proper chin cages the shavings are underneath the wire so they cant dig at it to make any dust, but some wood shavings are mostly dust free nowadays anyway

 

[fluttermoth]

Yes, I always make sure I get dust free shavings and yes, they are under the wire of the floor too, in the chin's cage (I know you shouldn't really keep chins alone, but he's a rescue and is 12, so I'm not sure about trying to introduce him to another at this stage )

 

[Buffy]

I used to use wood shavings but found that it
did not absorb the urine and so made my pigs
wet, which caused problems, but when I changed
to Megazorb as that was very absorbent, my pigs were dry,
the only thing with Megazorb it is dusty.

 

[phoenixgsd]

Yes, I always make sure I get dust free shavings and yes, they are under the wire of the floor too, in the chin's cage (I know you shouldn't really keep chins alone, but he's a rescue and is 12, so I'm not sure about trying to introduce him to another at this stage )

chins bond quite well with humans if kept alone and they get alot of human attention, they dont introduce easily do they, i have 3 males in 2 separate cages (takes up half my lounge ) because they dont get along, even though they were young when i tried, they just wouldnt take to each other unfortunatly,

 

[MBOU]

I used to use Megazorb but found that whilst its 10 x better in terms of cost, smell, absorbancy etc than CareFresh... it really was dusty.

I dont like using shavings, they really arent that ideal for anything really but my housemate was alergic to them so we had to find alternative.

The worst was the guinea pigs, i could deal with cleaning out 100+ rodents every week but the rabbits and guinea pigs needed doing every 3-4 days and i wasnt doing it on my own (when you have that many critters, any mess at all smells unbearable!) so we looked into horse bedding. Equestrian people have a lot of horses with allergies/that are worth insane ammounts of money and a lot of money goes into creating their beddings. Works out a lot cheaper too if you can store a bale. Megazorb was of course designed for horses

We tried a wood based product called Bliss but it didnt absorb much and smelled bad when wet so changed to Aubiose, brilliant stuff! cost us about £11 for a huge bale of it.

Also got a big bale of the paper flakes too, cost about £8 for 20kgs and would scatter in a few handfulls to make bed extra soft and snuggly.

 

[Blitz]

I used to use aspen for piggy's bedding until I built him a C&C cage and now I have fleece. I have the cage bottom (shower curtain, soon to be coroplast) a towel/towels and I sprinkle some baking soda on the towel to keep the smell down. And then I put fleece on top. The urine will run through the fleece onto the towel to absorb, and the baking soda will help with the smell. Just don't use newspaper with fleece, the smell isn't too pleasant. I change the fleece and towel every 2-3 days. I spot clean the cage 2-3 times a day. I can get away with once a day, too.

I've used carefresh bedding too. Works well, but isn't that cheap.

 

[dbanner]

I have 2 chinchillas (male and female together) 2 degus (2 males together) and 3 guinea pigs (2 females in 1 cage and a male in another cage) The chins and degus have dust free wood chippings and a good quality hay, the guinea pigs have saw dust

The degus and chins are so interactive. Easily trained with a lot of time and effort but its definitely worth it