How To Pick A Guinea Pig Cage
Your pet guinea pig can spend most of its life in it’s hutch, it’s important that you have a large enough cage for the Guinea Pig and also all its toys and accessories. One can find several Guinea Pig hutches in pet shops nowadays it can be a bit confusing on choosing which one is best for you guinea pig. Simply be mindful that guinea pigs need room to exercise and play and room for feeding and sleeping. Below there are some suggestions on the way to make your guinea pig comfortable and what to look for before choosing a guinea cage.
What you place in the guinea pig cage is just as important as what dimension the hutch is. A big hutch devoid of the required accessories is going to be boring for the Guinea, and it’s going to in the long run have a very depressing result on your Guinea Pig and making it distressed. The guinea pig cage should be completely enclosed to keep your guinea in and other animals out. Include toys and tunnel’s and low ramps though guinea’s aren’t agile and do not climb very well, but they do need areas to play, explore and exercise. Keeping all this in mind, and refilling food and water – your Guinea Pig is assured to be pleased and healthy.
The safest cages are made from plastic, stainless steel, wire, or a mixture of these materials. Wooden hutches are easily chewed through and glass cages don’t make available enough exposure to air and might also shatter easily and injure your Guinea Pig/s. Don’t use wire meshing as the flooring to your Guinea Pig’s cage as housing your Guinea Pig’s in a cage with a wire mesh flooring is putting them at risk. Guinea’s have extremely sensitive and thin-skinned feet and the wire can cut their feet or give them a condition known as Bumblebee. This is when the paw of the Guinea swells up much bigger than its usual size and is very painful to the Guinea. So if your cage has a wire floor, that many do, make sure to cover it with cage mats.
It is a good idea when getting a Guinea, to also get it a cage mate. In the wild, guinea pigs live in herds, consisting of usually one dominant adult male, some females and their babies. Pet guinea pigs would much rather live as a pair or a herd, they feel that there is safety in numbers. In addition they enjoy the company of their own kind, communicating and interacting with each other. Both males and females have a strict dominance ranking. The domestic Guinea’s act in much the same way as wild guinea pigs.
Of course before you attempt to introduce guinea pigs to each other, you need to be sure 100% that you know the sex of your pet guinea pigs. Please don’t rely on pet shops, many pet shops do get the gender wrong. Many even allow mixed sexes to interact and live together so some sows might already be pregnant.