Maureen M Weibel <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote
>Dear List,
>
>This is only the second time I've written, and it is not with happy
>news. We lost
>Mario yesterday.
Sorry to hear you lost your gerbil.
>As near as we can tell, he would have been 3 years old in a week or 2.
>From what I've
>been reading here on the list, that's a pretty good life expectancy for
>a gerbil.
>Also, even though he seemed to recover from a similar illness last summer (see
>below), he never regained the weight he'd lost (he used to be the heavy
>one!) and was
>slightly less curious and more reclusive then he had been before. I
>suppose he could
>have been developing a tumor all that time, just hiding it well as a survival
>instinct.
The infection may have been secondary to a hidden problem that lead to
him losing condition and lessened his resistance to disease.
>We still are fretting about whether we fed him something that caused a
>blockage. We
>never let them chew anything fibrous (like cotton balls) after Deb
>Rebel's reply to
>my first posting, but I know he had some cheddar cheese on Sunday. Does
>cheese cause
>constipation in gerbils? Also, he ate some Shredded Wheat & Bran cereal
>and some
>celery leaves (not stalk). Could food fiber cause the same problems as
>cloth fiber?
I doubt any of the things you fed him would cause a problem. Although
cheese is high in fat and salt, neither of which is likely to be good
for a gerbil, vegetable fibre would make up a lot of their diet in the
wild.
Cotton is unlike most cellulose fibres because it has a strong wax
coating that protects the fibre, and not doubt would help it resist
digestion.
--
Julian
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
National Gerbil Society
http://www.gerbils.co.uk/
