Two of the most important elements of a chinchilla cage are the bedding and liners.
Without 1 of these 2 items, your chinchilla won’t be happy or healthy and the cage will smell it’s as simple as that!
Choosing the right bedding or liners can sometimes be confusing as there just soo many options and all of them say they do a great job, this makes it hard to make a decision and you end up searching for hours looking at all the different options.
Thankfully, we have put together this page that shares our top recommendations for chinchilla bedding and liners that are battle-tested and given the thumbs up by our own advisors!
Rather than providing you with 10 different options and just giving you yet another decision-making headache, we have boiled these options done to our number 1 choice for each! As this is really all you need.
If you don’t have the time to read the reviews on the bedding and liners we have handpicked, then we have provided a handy link to Amazon, where you can check them out directly…
- Critter Nation Cage Liners – (Find Out More On Amazon)
- Carefresh Bedding – (Find Out More On amazon)
Cage Liners
We recommend using cage liners rather than loose shaving as bedding. This is simply our choice but we do have good reasons for pointing you in this direction.
Cage liners only have a one time cost, so they work out much cheaper than bedding over a period of 12 months and over.
You simply attach the liners to your cage and you are good to go. They look much tidier than bedding and are also easier to clean.
Whenever your chinchilla poops you can simply, scoop or vacuum the poop from the liner with ease as well as cleaning any unused hay and food at the same time.
This is much harder with loose bedding as the poop and bits of food get lost deep down inside the bedding.
cleaning is extremely fast to do with liners and will save you lots of time when compared to loose bedding.
Liners are also very easy to clean as you can just throw them in the wash and in a short period of time they are all clean and ready to be used again.
This cuts your cleaning time down by a quite a bit, although do have to wait for them to be cleaned so that’s something to think about.
You can, however, have 2 sets so when one set is in the wash, you can be using the other set and vice-versa.
One drawback that needs to be mentioned with the cage liners we recommend is that they are only for certain models of the Critter Nation cages as they are made to measure for those cages.
We recommend these specific fleece liners because we also recommend the Critter Nation 2 Duel Level Cage that these liners fit.
Assuming you have a Critter Nation cage, then these liners are what we recommend 100% of the time for comfort for your chinchilla and ease of cleaning.
Bedding
If you don’t want to use cage liners or you can’t get them for the model of cage you have, then the only other option you have is to use bedding.
There are tons of different bedding out there and it can be hard to know which ones are good options for your chinchilla and which ones you simply need to stay away from.
To be honest, there are lots of good options but the one we would recommend you use is Carefresh.
Carefresh is extremely comfortable bedding that’s well made and designed specifically for small pets such as chinchillas.
When picking bedding, one of the first thing you need to look for is a bedding that is low in dust. The good thing about Carefresh is that it certainly ticks this box.
It’s super soft with no sharp pieces and it’s also extremely absorbent.
You do need to remember that as we mentioned earlier, no matter how good your bedding is, you will have added cleaning and lengthier cleaning times then if you used cage liners.
You also need to factor in that there is an ongoing cost to bedding as opposed to cage liners.
However, if you are happy to use bedding after weighing up these factors, then we would certainly point you in the direction of Carefrsh as you bedding of choice.
