In picking the animal up, the base of the tail should be grasped and the body supported in the other hand. Care must be taken to maintain a gentle but firm grip, as the gerbil is very agile and may wiggle free quite easily and thus fall to the floor. Gerbils resent being turned onto their backs and will struggle when held that way. Procedures for the collection of blood, urine, and fecal samples are essentially the same as those described in the chapter on Hamsters. Chemical Restraint and Anesthesia Chemical restraint, anesthetic recommendations, routes of administration and dosages have been briefly summarized in the appendices of Volume 1 of this Guide and should be referred to.
Injectable anesthetics undergo very rapid metabolic degradation in small rodents.
However, probably the safest and least complicated procedure is by chamber induction with methoxyflurane, followed by maintenance, using a mask and the same anesthetic. A simple chamber for small rodents is often improvised in the laboratory by using a bell jar and a pledget of cotton soaked in a volatile liquid anesthetic. A perforated platform must be placed between this and the animal. The gerbil generally presents very few health care problems. A localized hair loss, particularly over the dorsum of the tail, is sometimes associated with overcrowding and results from chewing and clipping each others' hair.