Is It Legal to Own a Degu? State-by-State Guide

The degu is a Chilean rodent that looks, to anyone who has not kept one, like a slightly long-tailed guinea pig. Regulators do not see it that way. It is restricted in fifteen jurisdictions and outright banned in eight, which makes it the most heavily regulated of the small rodents ordinarily sold as pets, and the reason repeats almost word for word as you move from state to state.

Where Degus Stand

The Same Six Names, Over and Over

Read enough of these rules and one sentence starts to repeat. Alaska clears the guinea pig, the cavy, the chinchilla and two gerbils. Wyoming's domesticated list clears the chinchilla, guinea pig, gerbil, hamster, mouse and rat. Oklahoma clears chinchillas, gerbils, guinea pigs, hamsters, mice and rats. Connecticut puts the entire order Rodentia in Category Two and then excepts nine species, the guinea pig among them.

The degu is missing from all of them.

This is not a series of states deciding the degu is dangerous. It is a series of states writing down the rodents that were common in the pet trade when the list was drafted, and the degu arriving later. Arkansas is the clearest case: its cleared list names the chinchilla, guinea pig and hamsters individually, and the degu's absence from that company looks deliberate rather than accidental.

California makes the contrast sharpest. It restricts the whole order and names five exceptions, and the chinchilla, a close relative and also a South American caviomorph, is among them while the degu is not. The same reasoning bars the gerbil there, from the same subsection.

Banned, Permitted and Merely Unwritten

The eight bans do not all work the same way, and the difference matters if you are trying to get an answer from a state office.

Georgia and Connecticut ban by rule, working through taxonomic groups and excepting what they mean to allow. Georgia's DNR names the degu specifically. Those are decisions.

Colorado, Alaska, New Mexico, Hawaii and DC ban by absence. Colorado files the degu as regulated wildlife because it is on neither list, and the state has no pet licence it could issue even if it wanted to. New Mexico's default clause designates an unlisted non-domesticated animal Group IV until the director says otherwise. Hawaii's Octodon entry does not exist, while the chinchilla and guinea pig are both conditionally approved, which is a clean illustration that Hawaii works species by species rather than by group.

The seven permit states are a softer version of the same thing. Florida's Class III is explicitly residual, covering all other wildlife not listed, and the degu lands there by not being anywhere else. New Jersey bars possession of any exotic or nongame species without a permit and then names the handful that may be kept without one.

Unclear Is Not the Same as Allowed

Two states resist a clean answer, and both are worth understanding rather than guessing at.

Alabama's rule turns on the phrase wild rodent, which the rule never defines. A pet degu is captive bred, but Octodon degus is a wild species with no domesticated lineage behind it, unlike the hamster or the guinea pig. Which of those facts the phrase is reaching for is not something the text settles.

Pennsylvania names the degu nowhere at all. What arguably catches it is a catch-all barring possession of wildlife captive bred in another state, read together with the definition of wildlife. That is a chain of inference rather than a rule about degus.

In both, the honest answer is that the state has not said. That is a reason to ask before buying, not a reason to assume.

What to Check Before Buying

Degus are social and usually kept in pairs or groups, which means a restriction reaches more than one animal and a move reaches all of them at once. The full jurisdiction-by-jurisdiction detail, with the regulation text and the date each entry was verified, is on the degu page of the exotic pet law map.

Sources & Further Reading