Guinea Pig Care & Health Tip: A bigger cage means a healthier pig!

The bigger your piggy's cage is, the healthier and happier he or she will be! As a general rule, pet store cages are far too small for guinea pigs. Cubes and coroplast cages, more commonly known in the guinea pig community as C&C cages, are a great and inexpensive alternative to the constrictive cages sold at pet stores. As CavyCages says, a larger cage will provide your pigs with more exercise area, stimulation, play space, and room to explore, resulting in a happier, healthier and fitter pig.

Here is a quick look at our current cage setup. Currently our entire setup is just over 31 square feet of space total. Whee have two floors, including a loft on the upper floor. Instead of traditional wood shavings or hay bedding, we have anti-pill fleece (separate post on this topic to come). Our ground floor is composed of 2x5 grids and our top floor is 2x3 grids. Since Revy is still new and isn't used to being in close quarters to the rest of us piggies yet, she has her own 2x3 grid enclosure that is connected to ours but sectioned off, so she can still see, hear and smell us. Our humans are hoping that with time, she will get more used to us so they can change our cage configuration to be one large enclosure. Whee also spend a lot of time outside in our playpen, which is a 5x7 foot area.

For more detailed information on C&C cages, visit the CavyCages website. They have a very helpful How To page, along with a guide of different options and add-ons and cage styles. Our humans found their gallery quite useful for inspiration and ideas.

So what do you think fellow piggies? How big is your cage?

Guinea Pig Care & Health Tip: Weigh me weekly!

Me, Truffle, waiting for my weighing

Hello, Truffle here! Today I will be talking about weight. Many humans don't realize that a piggy's weight is a telling sign of his or her health. In many cases when whee become ill, weight loss and a decreased appetite are some of the first indicators. It is good practice to get in the habit of regularly weighing your piggies, recording their weights, and familiarizing yourself with their average weights and fluctuations.

"Wheek! May I have a treat please?"

According to GuineaLynx, you should weigh your pigs weekly and be alert for any dramatic changes. They recommend keeping a chart which will allow you to track gradual weight loss and if necessary, get medical help early, when many illnesses can be nipped in the bud. If your pig is already ill, GuineaLynx recommends daily weighing. This is because we piggies have been known to go off our food, due to the side effect of antibiotics disrupting our gastrointestinal tract, or because whee are not feeling well. Human sized scales are too large to get an accurate reading for us little piggies, so kitchen scales for measuring food are ideal.

Our scale

Our humans are in the habit of weighing us twice a week. If whee are sick, they weigh us twice a day before giving us our antibiotics to ensure whee are eating sufficiently (if not, we get hand fed and receive Critical Care with round-the-clock close supervision). Each of us gets picked up, plopped in a cardboard box, measured in both grams and pounds, recorded, then returned back to our home. For maximum accuracy, they make sure to zero the scale so the weight of the container doesn't get factored in. Whee all have our own individual health charts. They are currently working on compiling complete medical histories for each of us. We will have them post it up when they are done.

I weigh 1233 grams

...which is 2 lbs, 11.5 ounces!

Staring out the window dreaming of grass and veggies

To read more in depth, follow the links to these GuineaLynx articles on weighing and overall health tips.

Our playpen

Our play area

Today whee wanted to show you all our playpen! This is our play area outside of our regular cage. It's a 5 by 7 foot enclosure, with several protective layers of fleece and towels over a rug. Our humans fenced it off using some of the grids left over from our C&C cage, and put cardboard around the perimeter because certain piggies like to spray pee really far outside. Although whee secretly think Belka does so as revenge against the humans for creating such an escape proof enclosure.


In our playpen, whee always have a water bottle, a bowl of pellets, pigloos, a cardboard box filled with hay, and several bricks to use as stepping blocks. There is always a box or two lying around, so our slaves fill them with hay for us to jump into and munch on. We are rather fond of going to the bathroom while eating in there, so when it gets soiled they just compost it for us and give us a new one. Sometimes whee also get paper bags, cardboard tubes, or tunnels to play in.

Whee usually get to stretch our legs in our playpen every day or two for several hours. Our slaves say that this way, we keep active and healthy by promoting more exploration and exercise (whenever whee visit our vets, they always comment on how surprisingly muscular and fit whee are). Often we also have meals delivered here, such as in the pigture below where we're all sharing a leaf of Swiss chard. Our favorite is when the slaves scatter wheatgrass everywhere, it challenges all of us to run around as rapidly as possible with the goal of eating more than anyone else can!

Surveying the territory

Sharing a leaf of Swiss chard

Peaches reclining as Belka continues to eat

Wheatgrass hunting!

Piggy Pics of the Day: Water Bottle and Brick

Today whee will be explaining our water bottle setup! Our slaves put these objects they call bricks underneath all of our water bottles to absorb any leaks or drips. That way, our bedding stays dry. These also have the added benefit of helping us wear down our nails so trimming is easier, on our front pawsies at least! If whee want, we even have the option of laying on them to cool down. Peaches and Poof demonstrate for us how they use this system below.

The water bottle and brick setup

Peachy drinking from the bottle while simultaneously filing the nails on her front paws!

Poof takes a turn

Piggy Pics of the Day: Orange consumption demonstration

Piggy Public Service Announcement: Attention all cavies! Just a friendly reminder to make sure to get your daily dose of Vitamin C! This is important for good health and to protect against scurvy. Some good sources include: oranges, green peppers, strawberries and cranberry juice (which also helps prevent against bladder stones and urinary tract infections). For consumption demonstration, see Editor-in-chief Coppy's pictures above and below. To read more, see earlier post here.

Making this funny expression helps minimize juice drippage

Stepping sideways helps avoid stepping in puddles of orange juice

See, chin is still relatively clean!

Eating oranges and getting our daily dose of Vitamin C

As any good cavy owner should know, Vitamin C is essential to a guinea pig's diet. This is because piggies do not produce their own Vitamin C, so to prevent scurvy they must get it from outside sources, typically in the form of fresh fruits and vegetables. Ideally, they should get 10-30 mg/kg of Vitamin C daily, while young, ill, pregnant, and nursing cavies need extra. Excess Vitamin C is flushed out through the urinary system, although overfeeding can result in liver problems.

According to Guinea Lynx, one way to make sure your piggy gets enough Vitamin C is by giving a quarter of a 100 mg chewable or plain tablet. You should not add any Vitamin C to the water because it degrades rapidly and changes the flavor, which can cause your cavy to drink water less frequently because they dislike the taste.

Belka and Truffle have personal experience with this. When they were babies the only water available to them had Vitamin C added to it. They went crazy drinking water nonstop when our slaves brought them home for the first time, every half minute one or the other would run up to the water bottle and gulp continuously from it. Belka and Truffle drank so much that our slaves worried whether they were all right, this went on for over two days! They got used to it soon after though, and now they get Vitamin C from fruits and vegetables like the rest of us.

Here is a video of Belka, who is demonstrating how she gets Vitamin C from oranges. Whee must admit, she is not always the daintiest eater, you can hear her messily chewing and squishing away starting from 0:43 in the video.