Suggies At Home

I’m a very curious person by nature, and especially with animals, I’d like to know more about them if they are different. Like I remember I kept Googling for pictures or even description of a glider’s skull. I wanted to know how can a little creature like a glider can have over 40 teeth! Sadly, the pictures were either too small or too blurry.

Well, I finally got a skull. And Noooooooo….. I didn’t go kill a glider. What happened was that last year, a friend of mine decided to let me have his dead glider. It died after some complications with a cat from an accident. It was pretty…. well, weird to me at first, as to how do I preserve the skull properly without damaging the bones. Well, I won’t go into too much detail about it as it was a long long lonnnng process of waiting and cleaning.

So here is the skull. I have yet to know how to attach the lower jaw to the skull since naturally, tendons and muscles hold it in place. Now it’s all bones.

The skull, it actually doesn’t look like it belongs to a glider. The teeth reminds me of an animal that is raccoon or cat-like. But look at the back area, the bone is loaded with pores,  almost bird-like. I thought it meant its fragile but just got to know from Yueyi that the pores help strengthen the bone to withstand impact. Very cool.

Like I said, it really doesn’t have similarities to a glider’s face. Looking from the top, the skull really looks like it belongs to a bird.

Look at the tiny teeth of the inner molars of the bottom jaw. And look at the length of that bottom front tooth.

Look at those rows of teeth. Crazy right? To me, why I wanted a closer look was because I wanted to understand, are their teeth like ours? Or like rodents? From my observations, they look almost carnivore-like base on those fangs. The teeth are designed to chew both protein matter, insect matter and fruit matter.

I’m going to do more research on this and show some vets and see what they think. All this is done coz I wanna study more, so ladies and gentleman out there reading, please do not simply go and kill your glider just to have a “souvenir” for yourself.

If possible, I’d like to learn more about their whole skeleton, so in a few years down the road, I’ll get some vet help to preserve a skeleton if it’s possible to obtain it.

**** PS: I hope someone could reply me on how to clean bones and preserve it properly. All I did was soak the skull in bleach and then scrub with toothpaste.

A number of times people have asked me this question:

How do you bath sugar gliders?

Er…. first of all, most animals do not require baths with shampoos and conditioners. Only humans use shampoos and conditioners and soap and we would “naturally” think that all animals that we keep as pets should have a bath too.

Well, it is a big No for sugar gliders. Why? First of all these creatures have thick fur, almost chinchilla like. It is already conditioned properly by the glider with natural oils. The fur is thick and dense, so it is very difficult to dry if it gets washed with soap and water. It is easier to dry if the fur is only wet with water but if soap or shampoo comes in, the chemicals and cleaning agent in it will strip off the natural oils, causing the fur to soak up water. It is very difficult to dry. But then why not dry off using a hair dryer? NO NO NO NO…. No hair dryers please, the heat actually can burn off the ears. Sugar gliders have very delicate skin and very thin ear leather, so heat can burn them and cause pain and lots of damage.

Gliders also can easily drown if you were to put them in a basin of water. So no way….. no water baths please.

So how to bath a sugar glider? A glider is actually quite a clean animal. It cleans itself like how a cat does. It uses it’s grooming claws, licks them and comb themselves with it. For a newbie, it looks like the glider is scratching itself crazy but it really is just grooming itself.

If your glider is a little grubby or dirty, just use a plain old damn cloth or some baby wet wipes to wipe your glider. Use only fragrance free baby wet wipes that are alcohol free. Also, do not get those “pet shampoo sprays”. I recently heard that many suppliers are selling these together with the joeys but these pet shampoo sprays are not meant for gliders. Loaded with chemicals and perfume, a glider is super sensitive to these perfume oils. Also a lot are just water base, so it will cause your glider to become wet and catch a cold and fall sick later on. Stay away from such products. If you need to get a bit of dirt off or clean the fur a little, you can use baby powder or pet powder made with corn starch. Talcum powder is bad for their lungs so only use corn starch.

A glider should only ever get a wet bath if it fell into paint or gotten oil onto it’s body or smeared life threatening chemicals on itself. This should be done with proper vet supervision.