PLEASE HELP Bless shedding fur, sleeping more

[Kooch]

Hi, some of you maybe remember me and my little Bless. She is almost 4 years old now, and up until today she was a happy little squirrel.

She lives in the house with me, no cage.

Today in the morning I noticed she was shedding fur. She has no bald patches or anything, she doesn't scratch herself more or anything weird.
Hair just comes out when I pat her. She had no change in her diet, maybe for the last 2 days she ate a little cucumber and a little more salad than usual.

Apart from the fur, I noticed she is more calm, and doesn't jump around and climb as much, but it did not seem like anything was hurting her, when I picked her up and checked her.

She ate and drank as usual, cracked a few nuts. Otherwise she seems totally fine, but this lack of energy is concerning to me. She's usually up at least till 11am before going to sleep, but today she was laying around before 9am, then eating again, laying some more.. She just seems melancholic and lacking energy.

We didn't do anything different, she didn't eat new food, wasn't exposed to anything new. Her diet has been the same all this time, nut mixes and lots of fresh fruit and veggies.

I went and bought Calcium pills and a syringe, I read somewhere that she might be lacking calcium. One tablet contains 600mg calcium and a little D vitamin, for better absorption.

Should I make a paste out of half a tablet with water and force feed her??

I am really concerned, please help me!

Thank you,

Rozi & Bless :Love_Icon

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[Spanky]

I would start the MBD protocol right away; even if this is not MBD the extra calcium will not harm her and can only help. We typically avoid anything with vitamin D since these are meant for humans and the amount of D in them is intended for humans and way too much for squirrels. Here is the MBD link:

https://www.henryspets.com/emergency-treatment-for-mbd/

It does sound as if she is getting too many nuts (and seeds? not sure what "nut mix" is exactly). Two or three nuts a day is the maximum for a captive squirrel. For now cut all nuts from her diet and see if she responds to the MBD treatment.

Listing out her complete diet would be helpful as would a picture of her entire body.

No chance she ate a house plant, ate something she should not have, etc.? With free roam of the house, I am not sure how you'd be certain.. :thinking

[CritterMom]

Everyone pitching in - please note that this poster AND squirrel live in Slovenia and likely will have some issues getting the same products we have.

I do remember Bless - those ears! I think that your initial idea about MBD is likely right on, especially if she does not eat any sort of commercially produced rodent block.

The first thing you need to do is try to find a source of calcium without the Vitamin D in it. Yes, they do need D to process calcium, but the amount of D that is in supplements for humans is too high for rodents. Here in the US, the easiest fast source for us which is available everywhere is a human antacid called Tums, which are chewable and fruit flavored, and consist of just calcium carbonate with no D. That is a good place to look. We can also purchase calcium in powder form without vitamin D added to it, but must order it - I have NEVER seen it in a store. So I would look at the antacids you have available to you and see if you have a similar product as our Tums.

In an emergency, you can make your own. Boil some eggshells for 10 minutes, then thoroughly dry in a low oven - about 200F - until the membrane under the shell is all dry (check - probably 10-15 minutes). Grind as fine as you possibly can - coffee grinders work well but you can do it with a mortar and pestle, too. 1 teaspoon of this powder = 800-1000 mg ELEMENTAL CALCIUM which is about twice what you want to get into our squirrel a day during the first part of MBD treatment. So that would be 1/2 teaspoon of the ground eggshell powder spread out in small bits through the day. Find ways to hide it in food - even mix with a teeny bit of nut butter.

Edit - What is the info on the calcium product you have right now? Total calcium and D.

[Kooch]

Thank you so much for responding so soon!

So the capsules do not have anything else added, no sugar and nothing. These are the only ones we have around here, different ones I would have to order and being weekend, I would not receive them until next week!

Is it so so bad, if she would take half of this capsule? It has 600mg of pure calcium per capsule, and some D3, but there is a weird vaule, it think this means it's even under 1mg..

The problem here is, that I don't have an option in getting anything else atm, so please tell me if it will hurt her if I give her the paste mixed with these capsules???

These are the capsules below:
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What else I can do? I will post a pic of her food and mix, so you can see what she's been eating for 4 years.

I am so worried guys, I'm rushing home from work in a little :( :(

[Kooch]

Thank you so much for responding so soon!

So the capsules do not have anything else added, no sugar and nothing. These are the only ones we have around here, different ones I would have to order and being weekend, I would not receive them until next week!

Is it so so bad, if she would take half of this capsule? It has 600mg of pure calcium per capsule, and some D3, but there is a weird vaule, it think this means it's even under 1mg..

The problem here is, that I don't have an option in getting anything else atm, so please tell me if it will hurt her if I give her the paste mixed with these capsules???

These are the capsules below:
303338303339


What else I can do? I will post a pic of her food and mix, so you can see what she's been eating for 4 years.

I am so worried guys, I'm rushing home from work in a little :( :(
THe only thing that comes to mind atm is that she's been eating a little more sunflower seeds for the past week I guess. But she loves them so I wouldn't think it's bad..?

[CritterMom]

Sunflower seeds are very bad, unfortunately. You are looking for a balance of 2 parts of calcium to every 1 part of phosphorus in the entire diet. All the things they love the most like sunflower seeds and nuts and corn have REALLY high phosphorus and low calcium and their inclusion in the diet is really problematic.

Give her some of the paste for now. I cannot read the label well in your pic - it says 10 something for the vitamin D - what are those letters?

And what I would do if I were you is the eggshell thing. One large egg will give you just about enough for 2 days of MBD treatment, and you can do that until you can order something else.

[Kooch]

The unit for the D3 is microgram. That is less than 1 milligram per capsule. So it has 600 milligrams of Calcium and 10 micrograms of D3 per capsule.

I didn't know that!!!! I've been giving her about 20 seeds/day at least for a few days now! OMG

Ah okay, I will go and buy eggs tomorrow and I'll do that.

But for now:

How do I mix these capsules? Can I mix half a capsule with water and maybe a banana? She loves bananas also.

1 capsule yields 300 milligrams of Calcium and 5 micrograms of D3.

And then I give it to her today and tomorrow also? For how long?

[Kooch]

So I gave her almost a whole capsule. I spilled some on her so I think there was roughly 400mg of Calcium in 4 milliliters of water. She didn't resist as much, I'm only missing half of my fingers :)
I mixed it in about 4 milliliters of water and force fed it to her using a syringe.

Below, I am posting pictures of how much fur she shed right now during our little "procedure" (stress maybe as well?) and a few pictures of her. She's not missing fur in a sense that she would have bald spots, but in this angle you can see very well where the longer fur is missing, and underneath is winter fur I guess? I really don't know..

I did notice she doesn't jump as high, she would jump on the shelf sometimes, but I didn't see her do that today..

What do you guys think??
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[CritterMom]

OK, as I suspected, this is a LOT of vitamin D. The food we feed that is designed to prevent MBD has 48 IU of Vitamin per day in it. 10 micrograms is 400 IU. So 8 times more than recommended.

PLEASE either find a supplement that does not have the vitamin D in it or crack some eggs.

In high doses, Vitamin D is used as a rodenticide. Yes - something to KILL rodents. I am not being a needless dietary stickler here - you really need to find or make the proper product for this to work and not cause its own problems for Bless!

My squirrel blows his coat in the late Spring and I spit squirrel hairs and lint roll them off everything for a few weeks. However, calcium is linked with hair production, too.

[Kooch]

Hey guys :)

So maybe Bless seems a little better, but not much.. So today I am taking her to the vet. They said they have "pure" calcium, it's called CALCIUM BOROGLUCONAS.

Do you know anything about this?

How much should I give her, does it depend on the percentage? I have no idea how it looks like.

Do squirrels need 500mg of calcium per day? What are the foods most rich in calcium that I can give her daily? I really don't want this to happen again!

Thank you very much:Love_Icon

[CritterMom]

Yes, it is calcium mixed into a sugar syrup. The problems we have found with it is that it is not very concentrated so you have to give them quite a lot of the syrup for them to get enough to get past the MBD.

I would give Bless about 400mg per day of elemental calcium, NOT ALL AT ONCE. Break it up into several doses per day. You want to keep this up until you are seeing clear signs that she is improving. At that point, you will start to very slowly reduce the per day amount to about 150mg per day.

This is not a quick fix. It will take Bless weeks or even months to get over this totally - she needs to actually re-grow a lot of bone mass and that takes time. The biggest mistake people make is suddenly stopping as soon as the squirrel looks a little better...

[Kooch]

Okay, but it is still better than the capsules with D3 I got right? Is this the same as elemntal calcium??

I was searching for Calcium tablets or anything like that without vitamin D, and we don't have anything like that in Slovenia. Everything is with D3. There is calcium with something, but it is sold like a fix for fish tanks and turtles etc.

I will post here what I get, and I'd like to ask for you to look at it and tell me then how to dose it and how many times a day. I'm at work during the day, so probably if I give her some in the morning and some in the afternoon that would be ok I guess?

I'll see what the vet says today, and what they think it is.

I will post the picture asap as I get the calcium.

Does it always take this long for the squirrels to get better? Since this is not that severe, maybe it will not take as long.

What foods could I give her also to boost this, and what do I do when I stop the treatment? How can I make sure that this won't happen again?

[CritterMom]

The term ELEMENTAL CALCIUM is simply a term for the exact amount of calcium in a product. If you buy calcium pills, they obviously have calcium in them but they also have stuff that allows them to make it stick together so they can manufacture pills, sometimes it has flavoring added...so a 1000mg calcium pill doesn't actually have 1000mg of calcium in it. I likely has 6 or 700mg of calcium and the remaining 4 or 500mg are made up by the things they use to turn it into a pill. That is why you will find, on the back of the bottle, a reference to ELEMENTAL CALCIUM - so you know how much actual calcium you are consuming. The stuff you get from the vet is likely a liquid, so it, too, will have things other than calcium in it.

BTW, yesterday I decided to put my money where my mouth is and since I was planning on hard boiling some eggs anyway, instead of throwing the shells away I dried them out in my oven and ground them up in my little electric coffee bean/spice grinder. It worked like a charm and took me very little time. This is always an option for you.

Every squirrel has a different treatment time, so yes, it may not take as long for Bless, but it is important that you don't stop too soon.

As for food, you will have to do this research yourself based on what is available in your area or online. Do people keep rats as pets there? You want to look for a manufactured rat food - not something that is a bag of dried corn and seeds and stuff - I am talking about a commercial diet. Usually the food is shaped like small rods - about as big around as your finger and about an inch long.

Here is a link to Ebay with a photo of one type: https://www.ebay.com/itm/Teklad-14-Protein-Lab-Blocks-Adult-Pet-Rodent-Food-Rat-Mouse-Hamster-Gerbil-etc/332716454381?hash=item4d777231ed%3Am%3AmN0zB-ZQEWk0MmPN9o3ursw&var=541847300911&_sacat=0&_nkw=harlan+teklad&_from=R40&rt=nc&_trksid=m570.l1313

If you could get this brand it would be good. There is an excellent product that we all feed our squirrels here that has been formulated with MBD in mind, but it would have to be shipped from the United States and likely would be very expensive. If you go to www.Henryspets.com and send them an email asking about shipping to your country, they can give you more info. The woman who owns this company is a member of The Squirrel Board and they are quite helpful. She knows a TREMENDOUS amount about MBD.

[Diggie's Friend]

Calcium gluconate is the standard for veterinary used.

It is lower elemental calcium.


Calcium Citrate and Calcium Gluconate

Despite the fact that the calcium from any supplement source acts identically, there are some differences between calcium citrate and calcium gluconate. The most important of these is that calcium gluconate contains far less calcium per unit mass than calcium citrate. In a 2007 article published in the journal "Nutrition in Clinical Practice," nutritionist Deborah Straub points out that only 9 percent of the mass of calcium gluconate is actually calcium

Calcium citrate ranges from 20 to 24 % calcium, generally at 21 %. It is soluble in the stomach without food.

When giving MBD it is given generally without food, otherwise the stomach is getting less calcium due to limited gastric space. Gluconate comes with a food source to support it but it isnt' enough to come close to providing the elemental level per volume space that calcium citrate does. In this Calcium citrate, as it were offers the better of both worlds.

Citrates require a slightly higher volume measure to equal the calcium in calcium carbonate. Why is not due to it containing less calcium but rather for reason of being bonded with the organic acid Citric acid that increases the size of the molecules. It is the citrate that makes this form more soluble, which is why it can raise the blood calcium more effectively than Calcium carbonate. Unlike in humans that absorb calcium poorly, rats and tree squirrels have a digestive tract that supports the well uptake of all forms of calcium. The difference comes in retention in the blood and bones, which requires acidification of calcium to well support. Calcium citrate is already an acidified form; it raises the blood serum calcium better than Calcium carbonate.

https://thesquirrelboard.com/forums/showthread.php?11629-Coral-Calcium&p=236615#post236615

For example, "using Frontier Organics" Calcium citrate 3/4 Tsp. equals 500 mg. https://www.amazon.com/Frontier-Calcium-Citrate-Powder/dp/B000UYA1T6

This source is easily divided into 5 daily sub-doses of 100 mg. elemental calcium each.

To make it appealing enough to eat, add just a small Tsp. fraction 1/8 Tsp. or less of organic virgin coconut oil,

that "helps the medicine go down, in a more delightful way!

[Kooch]

This is the stuff I got.
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It says onthe bottle that it has 332mg of calcium gluconate and 68mg of boric acid. It isused for dogs, they but it in the veins. The vet calculated that in order for her to get 400mg, the intake should be 1,2ml per day.

Is this ok? He couldn’t tell much else, he didn’t know..

[Diggie's Friend]

That's the problem, he didn't know. I don't think that "boric acid" should be used in rodents.

[CritterMom]

I do not believe that "boric acid" be used with rodents.

It would be better to get just plain calcium carbonate than to use this source in my opinion. Powdered calcium carbonate may be available at your local market.

No - she has looked all over - read the back posts. Poster lives in Slovenia. Ordering US products can be really $$$!

There is all sorts of info on boric acid and rodents. Some recipes for balls of peanut butter and boric acid to kill rats, some with big banners saying that it absolutely will not kill rodents even in massive amounts. I am uncomfortable as all get out about it though.

1.2ml per day would be right for 400mg. I am not going to put my stamp of approval on this stuff due to the boric acid. It is likely in there as a preservative of some kind since this is for injecting. Hopefully someone with more knowledge on this will chime in.

I have given you an incredibly easy way to MAKE calcium from chicken egg shells (or any other bird egg) and even made some myself yesterday to make sure I wasn't leading you astray. I wound up with something that looks exactly what I purchase in powdered form. 1/2 teaspoon per day would be 400 mg...Now that I see how easy it is, I likely won't bother to buy it anymore!

[Kooch]

Yea I know, but right now it’s all I can get my hands on to. I called another clinic that specializes in rodents and small mammals, they have more experience.

The vet there said thet they sometimes use this and give it to the mouth, and also via injection.
He said that they don’t give it that much because they use pure calcium in powder form. So that is where I can get it apparently.

I don’t have a grinder here, but I will get one tomorrow and do the egg shell thing.

One other thing he said is that he would like to check Bless out. He wants to put her under narcosis in order to fully inspect her. Do you think that is a good idea? He says it’s a rutine procedure and that nothing bad can happen if they sedate her, but I’m very sceptical..

Also what do you think, should I give her this today than and tomorrow do the egg shell thing, or should I wait. I am taking her to the clinic on Wednesday..

[Centerline]

MBD protocol is always the most important and always first. But for my Ashley, the hair loss problem was corrected with extra UV lighting. She is also a house squirrel.

[Kooch]

Yea I know, but right now it’s all I can get my hands on to. I called another clinic that specializes in rodents and small mammals, they have more experience.

The vet there said thet they sometimes use this and give it to the mouth, and also via injection.
He said that they don’t give it that much because they use pure calcium in powder form. So that is where I can get it apparently.

I don’t have a grinder here, but I will get one tomorrow and do the egg shell thing.

One other thing he said is that he would like to check Bless out. He wants to put her under narcosis in order to fully inspect her. Do you think that is a good idea? He says it’s a rutine procedure and that nothing bad can happen if they sedate her, but I’m very sceptical..

Also what do you think, should I give her this today than and tomorrow do the egg shell thing, or should I wait. I am taking her to the clinic on Wednesday..
What do you guys think on this?

Also I found this rat food, this one I can get I think, from amazon. Is this one any good?
https://www.huellacanina.com/roedor-alimentacin-roedores-bunny-juniors-extra-granvoros-p-13487.html?language=en

https://www.chewy.com/oxbow-essentials-mouse-young-rat-food/dp/123581

I just dried the eggs in the oven. What kinda of foods am I allowe dto mix it in? Banana, bio coconut oil?

[CritterMom]

What do you guys think on this?

Also I found this rat food, this one I can get I think, from amazon. Is this one any good?
https://www.huellacanina.com/roedor-alimentacin-roedores-bunny-juniors-extra-granvoros-p-13487.html?language=en

https://www.chewy.com/oxbow-essentials-mouse-young-rat-food/dp/123581

I just dried the eggs in the oven. What kinda of foods am I allowe dto mix it in? Banana, bio coconut oil?

The oxbow from chewy.com is the kind of thing you are looking for. She may not like them as they are but you can do things to them to make them more attractive.

You can mix the calcium with absolutely anything that she likes!

[Kooch]

The vet that specializes in rodents said that he would like to check Bless out. He wants to put her under narcosis in order to fully inspect her. Do you think that is a good idea? He says it’s a rutine procedure and that nothing bad can happen if they sedate her, but I’m very sceptical..

[Kooch]

I gave her just the egg shells, not grinded yet and she ate a little.

What do I mix the powder with? Bio peanut butter? Coconut oil? Cant think of a food she likes that would allow to me to mix with powder..

What do you guys think of what the vet wants to do?

[Diggie's Friend]

I gave her just the egg shells, not grinded yet and she ate a little.

What do I mix the powder with? Bio peanut butter? Coconut oil? Cant think of a food she likes that would allow to me to mix with powder..

What do you guys think of what the vet wants to do?

If you can get coconut oil that would be the best choice, squirrels the taste. You want unprocessed coconut oil, not cooked, 'virgin', organic. It only takes enough to make the powdered cooked egg shell into a paste to give it some taste.

Peanut butter can work, mix a bit of pure water into it, as it tends to stick to the roof of the mouth in rodents that can be a problem.