01/30/2021
The most common question that we have been getting lately is this:
❓”Any idea when kits will be born?”❓
❓”What colors are you expecting?”❓
🍼So let’s talk chinchilla babies and genetics 🍼
Chinchillas are unlike other small pets such as hamsters, gerbils, and rabbits. Those animals all have shorter pregnancy times, a larger number of babies born and more litters born per year.
A chinchilla’s pregnancy typically lasts for around 111 days, with babies being born precocial (eyes and ears open, fully furred and mobile). This means that once the babies are born they can walk, run around, climb, eat, chew etc.
The previously mentioned animals typically have larger litters than chinchillas. Rabbit litters can vary from a few to eight or more. Even with dogs and cats, litter sizes can be large. Chinchillas on the other hand generally have between one to three in a single litter. Most commonly it is one or two, with three a possibly and four being a more rare occurrence.
Knowing if a chinchilla is pregnant can also be a difficult task. If a chin is only going to have a single kit, it is difficult to see any signs of pregnancy. Only in the final weeks before birth are baby kicks detectable. Males and females make good parents and can be housed together with their babies, so there’s no definite way to “know” a specific due date. Rarely do we ever see the mating process occur or know our females estrous cycles. Some breeders weigh their animals on a daily basis to try to gauge if there’s a pregnancy or not, but over the years we have found that this is not a sure proof method.
The only real way to have a steady supply of babies available would be to breed on a very large scale and own dozens and dozens of chinchillas. This would enable a Breeder to constantly have litters being born.
As for predicting what colors we will have, this is all based on chance. When breeding chinchillas, it is really a toss up of what colors will be born. When breeding standard to beige, there is a 50% chance of beige and a 50% chance of standard. This is an easy pairing to predict. However, when breeding for certain mutations, color combinations can be much more random. An example of this would be breeding a standard violet carrier to a mosaic violet carrier. This pairing will only have a 12.5% chance of making a violet or white violet. Things can get even crazier when you start pairing mutation to mutation. Breeding a TOV white sapphire to a beige sapphire carrier leaves you with 16 different possible color combinations. Far too often do breeders pair up some chins hoping for a specific color, only to have just standard grey born. So pairing chinchillas and hoping for a certain color is kind of like gambling 🎲
We here at Sunshine Chinchillas are a very small scale breeder. We more often have rescues who need to be adopted versus kits available. We started out as a rescue 16 years ago, got hooked on chinchilla shows which led us into a small scale breeding program.
So to answer the above question, we honestly do not have any idea of when litters will be born or exactly what colors they’ll be. We know that at some point kits will arrive but as far as a time/date/month, that is something we cannot predict. 🙂
(This guy is not for sale, photo is for attention ☺️)
