Degus are wonderful, busy, social animals, and they are also one of the harder small pets to keep in a home you do not own. Two features of degu life drive everything else: they chew almost constantly to keep ever-growing teeth worn, and a pair needs a big enclosure to climb, run, and dig in. In a rental, both facts land on someone else's property, so the commitment is as much about the lease and the landlord relationship as it is about the animals themselves.
Chewing Is the Daily Reality
A degu does not chew because it is bored or badly behaved; chewing is how the animal eats, explores, and maintains its teeth. Inside the cage that means every fitting is tested. Plastic cage bases, plastic shelves, coated ledges, food bowls, and water bottle parts can all be gnawed, and a determined pair can work through a plastic base corner and escape. For a renter the risk doubles, because an escaped or free-roaming degu treats the room the same way it treats the cage. Skirting boards, door frames, cables, carpet edges, and furniture legs are all fair targets in degu terms, and the damage happens quietly and quickly.
The workable pattern in a rental is strict containment plus supervised freedom only where you have proofed properly. Keep free-roam time inside one room you have checked board by board, block gaps behind furniture, lift cables out of reach, and accept that some landlords will reasonably say the pair stays in the cage or in a metal playpen. Build chewing into the cage instead: wooden shelves and ledges you expect to replace, branches and chew blocks in rotation, and a solid running wheel sized for degus all give the chewing somewhere legal to go.
A Large Metal Cage in a Rented Home
The second commitment is physical. A pair of degus needs a tall, all-metal cage with multiple levels, a deep solid base area for digging substrate, and room for a wheel, and a cage that meets that description is a substantial piece of furniture. It occupies a fixed footprint you cannot fold away when guests come, it weighs enough that moving it for cleaning is a two-person job, and it will not be easy to carry up narrow stairs on moving day. Measure the cage, the doorway, and the intended corner before anything is ordered, and think about where washable flooring or a protective mat can sit underneath, because hay, substrate, and water travel outward from an active degu cage.
Noise and mess belong in the same honest assessment. Degus are vocal, active in the day, and enthusiastic diggers, so substrate lands outside bars and wheels squeak at dawn. Thin rental walls carry that sound to neighbors, and a cage against a shared wall is a complaint waiting to happen if you have not thought about placement.
Permission in Writing, and an Exit Plan
None of this should be discovered after the degus arrive. Talk to your landlord or leasing office before you commit, describe the all-metal cage, the containment plan, and the chewing risk plainly, and get the permission confirmed in writing, including any conditions about rooms, flooring, or damage. Written permission protects your deposit, your tenancy, and the animals, because a pair discovered mid-lease in breach of a pet clause can face a sudden rehoming deadline that helps nobody.
That deadline risk is exactly why your records matter from the first week. Keep the pair's diet, routines, health notes, and handling preferences complete and current, so a house move is a transport problem rather than a care crisis, and so a genuine emergency rehoming, if a lease ever forced one, hands the next keeper everything the degus need without guesswork. That exit risk is exactly why records matter in KinsLe, where Transferrable Profiles can hand a future owner the degus' routines, diet, and veterinary history without gaps.