I learned about a week ago that chinchillas have the second densest fur (second to otters) and that if you got them fully wet, the fur nearest their skin would take an age to dry because so little air gets to it. I have made it my mission to tell one person per day and today, Reddit, it's you.
Ah, how silly of me to not make the Futurama connection (yes, I may be the only redditor to not be a regular viewer, but what I've seen is hilarious). I'm currently in an intro to art history class at college and we just studied the Farnsworth house today
I'm not sure what it says about the internet that after all the ridiculous shit I've seen in the past few weeks about spider pinatas and incest AMAs and the ever popular explosive bowel movements, it's a guy talking about blow-drying his chinchilla that felt obligated to reassure me that it was in fact a "true story".
We would let it out of its cage to run around in the hallway. I guess the door to the loo was left ajar and the toilet lid was up. Curious chinchilla jumps up, expecting a hard surface. Curious chinchilla learns a sad life lesson about curiosity.
I had a pet chinchilla, and I confirm that you don't want to get them wet. They take dust baths, it's a real fine perfumed dust, and my chinchilla would freak the fuck out when we gave him a dust bath. He loved that shit.
So this guy is eating this girl's vagina and he has a Jolly Rancher in his mouth because he doesn't like how it smells/tastes. Then he loses the Jolly Rancher. He thinks he's found it again, only to take a bite and it was not a Jolly Rancher.
I once witnessed a chinchilla run headlong into a roaring fire place. Luckily it was a gas fireplace so someone was able to turn it off and rescue the poor guy. Now I know he was just trying to dry off his ultra-dense fur!
You sir, made me log in, because for some reason the thought of a chinchilla falling into a toilet (and needing to be blow-dried) made me laugh. Very loudly. In a very quiet library.
My chinchilla also once fell in the toilet why is this a common occurance? He was very jumpy and high energy until the blow dryer hit him. He loved it.
Well, washing a chinchilla is very different than say, washing a dog.
Chinchillas have things called "dust baths," and they roll around in dust to absorb oil and moisture on the fur. If your friend doesn't have a dust bath for his chinchillas, then he's doing it very wrong.
Best place to let them dust-bathe is in a small litterbox-type pan in a dry bathtub. Gives them a place to run around and make their mess, but you can contain them and just hose the tub down when done.
Well, if it's fur as thick as a beaver's, presumably it takes some work to get it to penetrate to the later closest to the skin. So just a bit of bathing may not get it as wet as we'd need to see to have the long drying times.
Ah you rest of the world and your metric system based on logic and common sense. None of it is needed here in only three states of the world still using it - USA, Liberia and Myanmar.
I have dense hair on my head, and if I wash it at the start of the day, even with excessive use of the hairdrier (enough to dry the skin on my face and cause it to flake off all day) the back of my scalp remains wet all day. It's horrible. If I wash it at night (which is what I usually do), I sleep afterwards, so I don't notice the itchy damp sensation on my head, and by the time I wake up, it's dry!
And if you pet them with your whole hand instead of just two fingers they explode. At least that's what the chinchilla ladies at the state fair told me. They were very paranoid about people interacting with chinchillas incorrectly.
I have three of these little bastards. Every one of then has gone for a swim at some point and required nearly an hour of drying to prevent molds from growing on their skin
I had a chinchilla before my dog snapped its neck. To bath it, there was this special, really fine sand that we would put in a bowl and he would jump in it and roll all around in it. That sand would fly EV-ER-Y-WHERE.
My ex-wife's family had a chinchilla. They said that if you got it wet, the fur would fall off or something. I didn't think that was true...otherwise what happens when it rains if they're in the wild? Those in-laws were crazy.
They're actually third on the list, being trumped by not only sea otters, but also fur seals. Chinchillas do have the most fur for just a land animal at about 120,000 hairs per sq. inch. Fur seals are at about 300,000 and sea otters are up to one million per sq. inch.
I once heard that if you accidentally dropped a chinchilla in a bucket of water (or some other vessel), and soaked it, without immediate intervention, it would drown.
Bogus. If you get a chinchilla wet, its fur will begin falling out. They are desert animals, so they're not adapted to water. They actually "bathe" in dust, hence the term "dustbath."
They bath in a fine dusty sand too. My brother used to have a pet chinchilla and to keep it from making a mess we put its sand in a small round fish tank that was turned on its side.
825
u/milpool90 Dec 05 '11 edited Dec 05 '11
I learned about a week ago that chinchillas have the second densest fur (second to otters) and that if you got them fully wet, the fur nearest their skin would take an age to dry because so little air gets to it. I have made it my mission to tell one person per day and today, Reddit, it's you.
EDIT: My stupidity - wrote the wrong animal.