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Brief History of the Chinchilla
The chinchilla was used for it's fur by the fur trade as early as the 1500's - it takes 250 chinchillas to make a fur coat, but only one dumb person to wear it (Chinchillas for Pets Not Pelts). The chinchilla was first domesticated by a man called Mathias F. Chapman who was working in Chile in 1918 and saw his first chinchilla. He firstly thought about breeding them as pets, but then considered the fur trade. From 1919 to 1922 he searched and caught eleven chinchillas 'worthy of breeding', eight males and three females. The foundation of today’s chinchilla herds can all be traced back to Mr. Chapman’s eleven original animals.
It is easy for us to knock the fur trade and be horrified by it, but we must hand some credit to them. The first chinchillas were commercially farmed in thousands of fur ranches around the world. Without these farms our pet chinchillas would probably not have been bred as the original pet stock was derived from culls and other animals unwanted by chinchilla pelt farmers.
Virtually all we know about caring for, feeding, and breeding chinchillas is through decades of research by chinchilla ranchers. This groundwork cost them decades in time and millions of dollars in money. We may not condone the farming of chinchillas for fur, but we have to acknowledge that they are the reason we now know how to care for our pets in the best way possible.