Why do wild opossums look like this?
And ‘pet’ opossums look like this?
It’s because people don’t know how to keep them. Wild opossums have incredibly varied diets with everything from mice to bugs to mushrooms to berries, and they’re always on the move.
When people have a “pet” opossum, they have to have picked it up as a baby and habituated it to humans, and now they treat it like a house pet. Many of them are fed trash diets of dog food, raw meat scraps, and processed meat like hot dogs or hamburger. The lack of calcium at an early age leads to metabolic bone disease, which bows the long bones of the limbs and weakens their bodies. So they can’t climb anymore and don’t walk or run nearly as much. Combined with a poor diet, they gain weight quickly.
Many ambassador animals in rehab centers and zoos can develop the same problem. Especially rehab centers, a lot of captive Virginia Opossums are surrenders from people who realized keeping them is illegal, but the MBD has already started. Even with a better diet, they can become overweight really easily. It was such a struggle to keep the opossum I worked with at a healthy weight because something as simple as too much fruit in her diet would start pushing her weight up again. Even then, I don’t think we ever managed to get her to a “normal” range.
They look buggy eyed because what looks like the “whites” in that last picture is a sign of fat deposits in their face and around their eyes.
