ChinnyPigs Life

When I started with the guinea pigs I used a little dustpan and brush combo to clean up the poop on a daily basis. With the addition of 3 pound, nervous Pratchett, the dustpan/brush was no longer feasible, as Pratchett SMASHES poops into smaller, even dusty pieces as he runs away to the other side of the mansion whenever he sees or hears me. As an experiment, I decided to try using a hand vac to pick up the poo. It was quite a success. For the first week the pigs were anxious about the sound, but now they are quite willing to be right next to the it when I'm using it and it's making its super-loud noise. The girls popcorn and zoom around, because they adore a clean cage, and the hand vac made it happen faster! It would take about four times emptying the hand vac in order to suck up more poo. This was annoying, but not too bad of an issue. Of course, then I tried the hand vac with the chinchillas. It just doesn't have the power to grab that rice-shaped poo confetti. ...

Guinea pig boars (males) excrete more... stuff than female guinea pigs. They use their scent glands more, and they can develop nasty layers of smegma on their penises, and can accumulate bits of hair, fur, and other detritus in their anal sacs. Yeah, I'm going there right now so you know what you're in for if you keep reading! Coconut oil, cotton pads, glove if you'd like, facial tissues (softer than pads) and a treat. My boar, Pratchett, is neutered, which means I don't have to worry so much about his anal sac. I know, I know... what is an anal sac? It's just what's on the immediate other side of his bum hole. Boars' testicles can stretch it to a larger size merely due to gravity, and yes, from all reports this means that by the time your boar is an elderly guinea pig (5-7 years), he will have a large pocket with a large opening. The main thing that can accumulate in a boar's anal sac is poop. He may not have enough energy, as an old man, to p...

They rarely take turns like this When I first met my chinchillas-to-be I saw something in their habitat that horrified me. They had a bath, one of the plastic models, the one shaped like a house. It had been completely gnawed away so that unless you knew what it was, you'd never guess it had been house-shaped. Plastic is bad for chinchillas. They have a strong need to gnaw, as their teeth are constantly growing, and as chinchilla owners know, they enjoy grinding their teeth on lava. That's like filing your nails with a coarse grinder the size of a brick with the texture of basalt. Their teeth are STRONG, and need constant wearing down. The guinea pigs have ONE plastic toy, and they're too interested in its contents to eat the container With chewing comes consuming, and an animal chewing on plastic will inevitably ingest some of it. This can kill. Chinchillas, guinea pigs, and other rodents have tiny little digestive systems that can't deal with ch...

Rob (left) and Rory (right) cuddle as they sleep. Roland is in a tunnel in the playpen. The Chinnypigs changed places last night, with the giant guinea pig mansion moved to the former location of the chinchilla cage, and the chinchilla cage is now in the corner where the guinea pig mansion was. An essential change, it means you can actually walk through the door and into the room! When I ordered the first part of the piggy mansion from  Guinea Pig Cages Store  it was only one piece of furniture, about the size of a crib (guinea pigs are so obviously children substitutes). When I decided we were ready to expand from one pig to two, and I was having trouble bonding River and Melody, I ordered another of the same size, then attached them together and created a ramp from scored coroplast. The original location of the guinea pig mansion, seen here in nighttime mode. When I added the second cage to the first after they successfully bonded, I ended up pushing the right e...