Small Pet Bedding

Finally, I had chance to do a few jobs today, although it was a jolly busy day for a Sunday!

Most important of all, I cleaned all the cages and gave all my rodent people new bedding and sparkling abodes!

This is the range of bedding I now have for them.

The Carefresh, I originally bought when I got the rats back in June. They came in Carefresh bedding in their cage (which I got when I rehomed them) and I therefore assumed they must be happy with it and got a big bag.

However, after only a few days, I started to notice that Charlie was sneezing - A LOT! As a novice ratkeeper, I didn't know whether this was good or bad, so did quite a lot of reading up by googling "rat sneezing" and trawling forums and websites for information. I also noticed that Moses had a bit of a dribbly nose, and my web searching suggested that the bedding might be to blame.

So I researched further and found that a lot of people had found "Yesterday's News" cat litter was better for some rats, so I went online and ordered some - I've never actually seen it in a shop, but the internet came to the rescue again.

I washed out the rat cage and installed the new bedding, and within a couple of days Moses's nose was dry, and Charlie had almost completely stopped sneezing. I ordered more Yesterday's News, and now place a regular order for it as I use 3 small saucepans of it each week (I found one in the kitchen, which is a very handy scoop). The big bag of Carefresh was ignored!

Then Laura arrived. When I got her, I was given a small bag of woodshavings and some soft tissue-like bedding. I put the soft stuff in her little house, and the woodshavings on the floor of her cage.

Then I got the new cage, and thought she might like a variety of beddings - so now she has woodshavings in the bottom part of the cage and Carefresh (which I'm finally using again) in the top. She loves them both, and shows no sign of any allergy or problems with them. She adores digging around in the woodshavings and likes to line her bed with Carefresh (although I also give her a very small quantity of the soft stuff for ultimate snuggliness too).

These are some of the things that now occupy my mind since I've become a small pet owner!!!

In the afternoon and evening my mind was occupied with my second CELTA written assignment on language analysis. I finished it at 10 pm, then enjoyed a quick mojito on the sofa before falling asleep in the bath!