Historical article first published on 2022-01-08. Events, announcements and arrangements below refer to that period; check the organisations’ current information before acting.
“My degu chews the bars all day, even though they can spend several hours a day in a 30 m² playpen. If I stop them, they destroy everything to reach the bars again.”
“That sounds like possible stress and stereotypic behaviour. Enrichment may help improve their situation.”
“I know my degus, and no, that does not apply to them.”
“Look how happy my degu is, climbing on my dog.”
Predator-related cues can affect rodents’ behaviour, but findings on cat odours in infected rats or responses to images of snakes do not establish the stress level of every degu meeting a dog. Regardless of apparent calm, contact with a potential predator poses a safety risk.
“I feed my degus [brand]. Is it any good?”
“Other foods may have a more suitable fibre content and calcium-to-phosphorus balance. We need to assess the whole diet; see the SAB Degu Mix article and the feeding guide.”
“Yes, but my vet said [brand] was the best.”
“There is hardly any scientific information about degus, so we are here to help.”
All these situations are inspired by real exchanges. They are easy to find in Facebook groups about degus, and they can put both animals and owners at risk. One problem is advice offered without supporting evidence or relevant experience. Another is the spread of misinformation and arguments based on authority or bias.
Giving or following poor advice can seriously damage an animal’s health. In our own story, I believe misinformation contributed to the deaths of our first degus. The DDT forum recommended a supposedly suitable homemade mix, shared by an administrator without the research or perspective that would have been needed. It contained equal parts wheat, barley, oats and rye.
Alongside concerns about fat, non-structural carbohydrates, fibre and protein, I later identified what I calculated to be a calcium-to-phosphorus ratio below 0.5:1. I associate that diet with the dental disease and rapid loss of eight of my degus. This is my account of those losses, rather than a controlled demonstration of a single cause. My original statement that any ratio below 1.6:1 is necessarily lethal was too absolute: mineral balance matters, but a ratio alone does not define a universal lethal threshold. Values around 2:1 are often discussed in degu nutrition, alongside the absolute quantities and the rest of the ration.
There was also a vet who was unfamiliar with degus and did not think to examine their teeth. I still wonder whether they could have been saved. Trying to follow advice and do the right thing ended in disaster. Even though we could not reasonably have known everything, it is difficult not to blame ourselves.
We are far from alone. Reading advice on Facebook and other platforms shows how easily misinformation can reach degu owners and contribute to serious health problems. Some websites offer no sources; others copy text without understanding it. A reader cannot always tell whether an author has actually read a study or understood what it says.
There is also the problem of websites selling their own products, sometimes described as “vet approved”. Such endorsements can add to the confusion if the supporting reasons are unclear. A vet can be mistaken, and an argument does not become permanently settled simply because a vet supports it. That is an appeal to authority. This does not mean that the person must be right or wrong: it means the claim needs context and comparison with other evidence.
Citing sources is no guarantee of complete reliability either. At the time of writing, I had seen an online pet shop citing sources, including the Wikipedia page we had helped rewrite, while apparently selecting the information that suited its argument or overlooking the wider findings. Readers need to check what a reference actually supports.
So how do we find our way through this? How can we know what is really true?
Science does not offer a body of claims frozen forever. We observe phenomena and develop explanations, then sometimes discover years later that an explanation was incomplete or mistaken. Methods, instruments and technology affect what we can test and understand. Revision does not mean that everything was false; it means conclusions must remain open to evidence.
When reading an article or advice, ask questions. Cognitive biases can influence our perceptions without our noticing. The topic is more complex than this post can cover, so the following French-language videos offer an introduction.
A full playlist explores scientific scepticism and critical thinking: Zététique & autodéfense intellectuelle.
How can we check a claim?
Does that mean everything online is wrong? No. A few basic questions can already help us navigate the information: who published it, why, what exactly is being claimed, whether there is a commercial purpose, which sources are given and where it appeared. This is the beginning of fact-checking.
We can go further. These French-language resources explain the process:
- Les Décodeurs, including assessing a website’s reliability, checking a claim’s sources, and understanding a source of information.
- AFP Factuel’s explanation of its verification methods, used to investigate claims and limit the spread of rumours.
It is also useful to examine scientific publications themselves: their methods, authors and context. For more on the subject, I recommend the Arte documentary La Fabrique de l’ignorance.
What about Octodons.fr?
Now that we have raised all these doubts, how does Octodons.fr work? We could tell you that our articles have been read by researchers, degu specialists, vets and biologists. We have also exchanged with the founder of Degutopia before her death, and, more recently at the time of writing, with Guillermo D’Elía, who even asked us about degus in France.
Those are our accounts of those exchanges; some cannot be independently checked by a reader. In any case, they do not prove that every article rests on established scientific facts. Experts can lack knowledge of a particular subject or make mistakes too.
How we develop the articles
Despite years of experience with degus, one of our biggest challenges was to start again from zero: to say, “What if I do not know this after all?” That became the starting point for our search for scientific studies.
By 2021, we had collected 374 studies to read or use, many of them relatively recent. Not all concerned degus directly; some dealt with related questions or other animals. That distinction matters when applying their findings.
We began reading the papers, checking authors and methods, recording the information and following their references to obtain the original sources. For each article, we tried to apply a fact-checking process: monitor new research, trace claims back to their sources, compare findings, contact authors or people with relevant expertise and review the complete draft.
This helped us find further studies and produce articles informed by research. It did not make the content immutable. We try to explain the evidence available to us, and if later research changes our understanding, the articles need to be revisited using the same approach.
Conclusion
This post is not intended as a personal attack on groups, websites or their contributors. I want to draw attention to the need to check circulating claims and use reliable methods when sharing information. I encourage readers to consult the studies available to them, compare the evidence, ask questions and remain willing to doubt. Thank you to everyone who continues to place their trust in our work.
Sources
Octodons.fr (2022). [BLOG] La fabrique de l’ignorance – L’octodon, la recherche et groupes Facebook. Original French article, published 2022-01-08. https://octodons.fr/blog-la-fabrique-ignorance-octodon-recherches-conseils/
Vyas, A., et al. (2007). Behavioral changes induced by Toxoplasma infection of rodents are highly specific to aversion of cat odors. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 104(15), 6442–6447. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.0608310104
Watanabe, S., et al. (2022). Visual snake aversion in Octodon degus and C57BL/6 mice. Animal Cognition, 25(1), 33–41; published online2021. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10071-021-01527-y
D’Elía, G., et al. (2021). A new living species of degu, genus Octodon (Hystricomorpha: Octodontidae). Journal of Mammalogy, 102(1), 139–154. https://doi.org/10.1093/jmammal/gyaa143
AFP Factuel (n.d.). Comment nous travaillons. Editorial verification methods. https://factuel.afp.com/Comment-nous-travaillons