Pocket pet owners are faced with a plethora of bedding choices. Here is some information to help you select the right bedding for your pet:

Cedar

Cedar shavings are NOT a suitable bedding for small animals. Cedar wood contains a powerful and pungent oil, and the fumes can irritate their eyes. Cedar works well as a flea repellent, and should only be used as stuffing for your dog's or cat's bed.

Pine

Pine, like cedar, is a softwood that contains a lot of volatile chemicals called phenols. These phenols make the pine shavings smell nice, but they are also toxic to small animals. The toxicity of pine shavings isn't as clear as the toxicity of cedar shavings. But you should still avoid them.

Aspen

If you prefer to use wood shavings, aspen is your best choice. Aspen does not contain any of the volatile chemicals which make pine and cedar shavings toxic. Aspen is not as absorbent as some of the man-made beddings available, but it looks nice, and is inexpensive and readily available.

Newspaper Pellets

There are several small pet beddings on the market which are made from recycled newspaper. As an added bonus, these are eco-friendly! Newspaper bedding tends to be less dusty than some of the other beddings, which is a bonus for both you and your pocket pet. Yesterday's News is the most popular and available brand of recycled newspaper small pet bedding.

Beddings made from recycled newspaper are probably the least visually attractive, since they tend to be a murky gray in color. No one ever said that saving the planet would be easy!

Recycled Wood Fiber

Several products made from recycled pre-consumer waste are now available, and there are more every day. The last time I was at the pet store, I counted three: Kaytee Total Comfort, Critter Comfort, and Kaytee Soft Sorbent. These products are all eco-friendly, and some of them are more visually appealing than the recycled newspaper beddings. However, they do tend to be a little bit more expensive.

DIY

The last time I had gerbils, I asked them to make their own bedding! Every day I brought home a handful of paper from the office recycle bin. (ONLY paper which had NOT been printed on! Toner can be toxic. I was always surprised at how much blank paper ended up in the office recycle bin…) I occasionally supplemented this with a sheet of newspaper (newspaper ink is soy-based and non-toxic) or some cardboard toilet paper tubes (when they became available).

The gerbils heartily enjoyed nibbling these paper products into tiny shreddies. Although this collection of misc shredded paper products was not very absorbent, gerbils do not produce very much urine, so the problem was minimal. Every week I would scoop out a few handfuls of the old bedding just to keep things tidy.

Aside from providing an enrichment activity, this was a direct way to help take paper out of the recycling stream. I composted the used bedding, thus completing the circle.