To think that gerbils come from the same part of hell that toddlers do ( lighthearted)

[Nats1984]

Gerbils. Sweet little creatures that bring Interest to the kitchen , my 6am coffee wouldn’t be the same without them , I genuinely enjoy passing them a spent toilet roll, some sliced apple and a strawberry and I’m very fond of them in general .

Does anyone else though, think they have come from the same part of hell that toddlers have? I mean they manage to sleep through the daytime chaos in this house, you can hoover , have a small person tantrum , properly melt down about some improper pasta shape and fling the bin across the kitchen diner , you can lay on the floor screeching like a banshee because the little light in your trainers isn’t the right colour ... and those little gerbil fuckers will sleep through that . They won’t move. As soon as you try to settle down though, that glorious moment when all those bloody kids are actually asleep , you come to life , you are smashing that wheel around like you’re going for a gold medal in Olympic sleep disturbance , you’re up between 12 and 3 on the regs, just as my son starts to sleep between these hours , you and your sister rattle away . Just similar enough to the front door that you keep me up all night on high alert. Thanks ladies . 6 years and counting no sleep ....

Gerbils are amazing!

They are actually adorable and I’m really fond of them . The only gripe I have is that they seem to come alive and be really bloody noisy in the small hours when I’d rather like to be asleep . Noisy buggers! I think when we’ve moved to our new house in a couple weeks it’ll bother me less , currently watching a very muted tv with a huge lump of a four year old on my chest , said lump is 4.5 stone and amazing but seems to pass the baton to the bloody gerbils when he finally goes to sleep . I’ll never sleep again .

Aren't they nocturnal,?

Oh I loved my gerbils so much. But they were noisy at night.
Anyway one of mine lived to the grand old age of 5. He was very clever and used to respond to his name. He would just come and sit on my lap. My Dad bought a massive box home from work along with various other boxes and large cardboard tubes and I created a multi level play area for them in the large cardboard box. They would get about two hours in the evening in there. It wore them out!

Our gerbils are cute. They live in ds's room so rarely disturb me. But the chewing!! All of his clothes (including all of his school jumpers ) have little gerbil sized nibbles in them.

What an offensive post.

You can't tar all gerbils with the same brush.

NAMALT.

Oops should say NAGALT.

autocorrect.

@beela Do they have plenty of cardboard? Mine always loved kitchen roll tubes (one at each end til they met in the middle!) and tissue boxes (sitting inside busily gnawing around the edges!) They need a couple of new ones ever day.

This thread is making me broody for gerbils! I can't though, too much working away! If anyone has any pics they want t upload that'd be adorable though!

@FurrySlipperBoots yes lots of cardboard - loo rolls, egg boxes, etc. And various wooden chew toys, swaped round regularly for variety. One of them in particular just loves to gnaw everything. Good job she's cute 🙄

Oh wow, apparently I had Gerbil weirdos, mine were up in the daytime and slept at night. .

Gorgeous little animals.

Get rats _ it’s the only answer. They are way nicer than gerbils and awake at dawn and dusk rather than the middle of the night

I much preferred our 3 gerbils to the noisy hamster. One used to escape regularly and 2 fought so we ended up having to have two 1m long enclosures which took up far more space than I'd bargained for.

Gerbils are gorgeous. But I agree, can be very noisy at night

My gerbils would be awake for about three hours, then sleep for three hours, day and night. Yes, they were annoying - I had to move them out of my bedroom.

I’ll say one thing for them, they were very industrious little animals. We didn’t need a shredder whilst we had gerbils - they shredded everything very efficiently. They also spent a lot of time digging.

Our gerbils lived indoors, but they also had an outdoor run made from wood and fine chicken wire. It had a base, sides and a top lid. They loved it in the summer.

My kids are desperate for another pet other than the cat we have. Are gerbils good pets for children? We’d probably accept that the cleaning out etc would fall to us but could the children handle them safely? They’re 8 and 9. Are they better than hamsters?

Lovinglavidaloca I bought ds his first hamster when he was 6, yes the cleaning out always fell to me to do but it was the perfect first pet for him. It taught him about life & death ( especially when he came running in my bedroom with a very stiff, dead hamster in his hand) Gave him responsibility to feed it every day, but the amount of pleasure we both have had from all of our hamsters, however long or short their lives were was enormous.

We had gerbils, best cage was an old fish tank as it meant their ritual sawdust rearranging didnt end up all over the floor.

DD now has rats. They really are sweet with definite personalities. I rat sat while DD and DSiL were on holiday so they were in my home office. It was nice to have company.

We had gerbils. 4 boys we thought we were sold, a pair for each child.

Until the day we came down to a whole bunch of teeny little red gerbils. Oh shit, we thought, we obviously have one female (we're quick off the mark like that). We decide to examine nether regions of other gerbils (some very strange searches on Google gave us the needed details) and discovered that actually we had been sold 1 boy gerbil and 3 girls. We had inadvertently set up our own gerbil harem.

And then it turns out that gerbils mate while birthing with implantation delayed until nursing ends (seriously, they are at it in the middle of giving birth 😯). So we had one litter, two pregnant gerbils and another one on the way. It was insanity!!!

And then soooo many questions from the kids. It was quite profound. We had all of life presented in rodent terms. Incest, relationships, life, death - it was all there.

Yeah, so gerbils are quite intense. I'd agree!! Never again!!

And if anyone is interested in how it ended, gave back the 2 pregnant gerbils as it would have been just too insane but kept the nursing/soon to be pregnant mum with the litter and the dad - apparently the dads help out which is cute, we kept a bunch (safely separated by sex when a bit older!) in two big tanks and rehomed all the others. It was quite the gerbilian saga!!

Moral of the story: always double check the sex (and don't buy from a pet shop - id only ever get from a professional breeder now)

I love this story! We have had gerbils for years and they never tire. They are fantastic little creatures with individual personalities. They are curious and sociable. I would urge you all not to buy from pet shops and always go to a rodent rescue centre first as pet shops (as the lady above wound testify) do not know what they’re doing half of the time. It is all about the money. Specialist charities will give advice and support on a long term basis. If the gerbils Declan then you can also introduce a different gerbil and ask the charity to care for the perpetrator or victim whilst you try to find a better match. It’s a complex gerbil world.
We have three right now, who get on well. The me is castrated and two females. Never buy a single gerbil. They live in colonies and it’s cruel to keep one alone, as it would be for us to live alone

We’re taking care of a couple of gerbils while their humans are away. Very cute and busy little animals, and seem to love being talked to.

My gosh do they smell and make a mess though! And I say this as the owner of 6 free-ranging rats 😂 (tbf, maybe they’re marking more than they usually would because they’re in an unfamiliar house).

Not sure if the people commenting realise this is a zombie thread. Anyway, when I had them years ago I kept them in this massive glass aquarium I filled with soil (I saw them being kept that way in an animal unit I worked in in a college and thought it was great). Every night they’d get up and build elaborate tunnels and rooms in the soil. Kept them busy, they loved it, and even better it’s a fairly quiet activity (apart from dirt hitting the sides when they were kicking it out of the tunnels). Every couple of days I’d take them out, flatten the soil and they’d start again :)

Gerbils are awesome. We've had 13 over the past decade or so. You can "train" them to sleep more at night by keeping them awake and active during the day. They're not naturally nocturnal like Hamsters. They'll stay awake more in the day if there's something going on. Like children, they get into sleeping habits/patterns,