Fighting Chinchillas Need Help

barbackz asks

I bought two new more beautiful chinchillas: one male ebony and one female mosaic. The male is 10 weeks old and is being housed with my 9 month old Gizmo. The cage is rather large since I built it that way. My problem is Loki, the youngest, keeps attacking Gizmo. Why is it that he is so submissive? He is 2 times Loki's size and he runs away like it's the other way around. I know chinchillas sometimes don't get along at all, but I thought since Loki was young they would get along fine. I separated them after two days when I saw fur in Loki's mouth. I feel horrible and feel that no matter how I introduce Gizmo as a companion, Loki will continue to dominate over him.

Infolific answers...

We introduced two chins by first keeping each in separate cages. The cages were kept quite close to each other. We would, at first, only let one chinchilla out of her cage at a time. We also created a divider in one of the cages so we could get the two chinchillas even closer to each other as time progressed. Eventually, we let both chinchillas out of their cages together, but always supervised. As the fighting/chasing incidents decreased, the time we allowed them to be together increased. Feel free to check out a somewhat more detailed description of how we introduced our chinchillas.

There are likely variations on the above throughout this forum, but the main idea is to control the introductions and stop any stress-inducing behavior quickly.