How to Buy & Care for Chinchillas - How to feed a chinchilla pellets

This is Lauren on behalf of Expert Village and we are going to be talking about feeding a chinchilla. The typical diet of a chinchilla consists mostly of a pelleted formula. This here is Missouri Food. It is one of the higher quality foods that's available. A lot of the pet food stores actually don't have very good quality food. As you see here, it's all pellets. It doesn't have anything else mixed into it. Some of them will contain nuts, sunflower treats, sugary foods and those can actually cause compaction or health problems within a chinchilla. Nuts actually they can't digest at all. So you want to make sure that you have a really good food. Some of the brands that you want to look out for are Oxbow Tradition and also Missouri. Some of the places that you can find these foods, if you can't find them in the pet stores, are online by doing a search. Also you can contact a local feed store. I buy chinchilla food in large quantities in large bags. It lasts a very long time and it's actually fairly inexpensive that way as well. In addition to having pelleted food, you also want to have hay available. Hay that I use for my horse they eat the same thing. They can have Timothy hay or alfalfa hay. If you have a chinchilla who you want to keep some weight on, you can actually give them the alfalfa hay. It has a little bit more density. It has a little bit more nutrition and it has a very high calcium value. So you want to always have hay available as well as the pellets. You don't want them to ever go without food, as it stops their digestive tract from moving through. Watch our next segment on "Feeding: Part Two".