How to teach degus?

My blog posts have been all in Finnish so far, but now I decided to write a blog post in English. This is about how to teach your degus. I have written a similar post in Finnish, but about degus agility. So for every reader that doesn't know Finnish, my blog is mainly about degus and I might write more posts in English sometimes.

Degus are intelligent animals and they can learn their own names and also different tricks.

 <3 My degu Malina sleeping next to Cherry. <3

First of all, when you are teaching your degus, you need to give them a treat, when they manage to do the trick. I usually use degu's food mix or oatmeal, because they seem to like those. Really any treat suitable for degu's diet is good, but be aware to not feed your degu too much. The main thing is that your degu likes the food. Food motivates degu to do the trick. 

Use different commands (For example: jump, spin etc.) to teach your degus. They can remember the commands and learn to do the trick, when you say the command. Also call your degus by their names so they can know that you're talking to them.

Degus are fast on learning new things, but teaching degus does anyway take some time. So be patient and teach your degus diligently. Teach them regularly so they can remember well, what you taught them last time.

The tricks that I have been teaching our degus lately include spinning and jumping. Also different agility tricks are good to teach for degus. If your degu is getting wild and doesn't seem interested about learning the tricks, give it some time and try teaching later and sometimes your degu might not be hungry so then the food probably won't motivate your degu to do the tricks.