helpful people posted:

alucinor posted:

kazmeyer posted:

And if you're really lucky, you'll get to hear the mystery noise. Chirping. I don't mean burbling or squeaking, I mean "holy gently caress there's a bird in the living room". Occasionally, guinea pigs just zone out and start chirping, loudly, like a bird. No one knows why they do it, not every pig does it, but once you hear a pig do it once you'll usually hear it again. I had a chirper, and it was an amazingly fascinating phenomenon to see and hear.

kazmeyer posted:

So anyway, there's plenty of theories, but nobody's got a clue why it really happens.

alucinor posted:

I have never known a pig in 10+ years who didn't eventually decide that bell peppers are heaven on earth.

kazmeyer posted:

If you're talking C&C cages, she's already ahead of the game by a considerable margin. Most guinea pigs spend their lives in godawful pet-store cages and never have any real freedom to move around. Good on you.

kazmeyer posted:

Well, pigs are usually most active when they're young, but I've had even 5 year old sows start a stampede now and again. The best thing you can do to encourage exercise is give them as unobstructed a track as possible around the outside of the cage. This will encourage them to run laps, which they'll do at odd hours and whenever they get the notion.

Another good exercise is floor time, if you can block off a section of a room and let them just explore around, they'll get plenty of exercise checking out all the unfamiliar terrain. They also might pee on your carpet, so be prepared to deal with that.

And the more pigs you have, the more exercise they'll get, just from interacting with each other. But occasionally one will just randomly feel the need for speed, and that will sometimes set the others off. There's few sights funnier than five guinea pigs, all lined up nose to tail, trotting around the living room until one gets spooked and they scatter like a bunch of neighborhood kids that just broke a window at the creepiest house on the block.

kazmeyer posted:

That could kind of be a factor, guinea pigs like it in the 65-75 degree range, and I noticed the few times I managed to let the thermostat slip a few degrees below that they really didn't want to do anything but huddle in their pigloos and not move.

Serella posted:

And scream like you are murdering them.

Cowslips Warren posted:

One day I want to get another piggie or two. The backyard is full of grass and weeds the tortoises are not keeping down fast enough! And we kinda need another few mouths to get rid of some of the excess salad anyway...

alucinor posted:

I've never met a pig who was happy with bathing. Being freaked out is perfectly normal, don't worry about it. Just hold them tight so they don't wriggle out and fall.

I recently met someone who came up with a neat solution to wet bedding. She got some egg crate louvers - these are plastic grid panels meant to cover fluorescent light fixtures - and cut them to the size of her cage. She lays a layer of carefresh, then a louver, then another layer of carefresh. The wet stuff goes down to the bottom layer and the top stays dry, and the pigs aren't actually walking on the gird. A similar solution could involve a layer of bedding, the grid, then a layer of fleece on top, if you preferred using fleece.

Part-Time Robot posted:

No, it's definitely the pigs. I was given a pig to hold, nowhere near a cage, and I simultaneously broke out into hives and swelled up. I'm near my sister's chin's hay all the time and it never bothers me.

Just another one of nature's cruel jokes on my body, I suppose.

Moist von Lipwig posted:

Thanks, I'll give that a try, I've been worried sick about the little guy

Edit: We found him! He just showed up in the livingroom all of a sudden!

spiralbrain posted:

sup yawning little buddy?





I miss these two dearly

Diogines posted:

I could not imagined something so small could make so much poop heh.

Diogines posted:

I had some small, I don't know what you call them, paint buckets? I had 2 of them in in the enclosure as hides, a pigloo and a strangely shaped piece of cardboard which they liked, but they loved the upturned bucket shaped things best though they used them all. The plastic in them is a lot softer than the pigloo, which she does not chew on. Would they chew on a PVC pipe?

Where do you buy the cardboard tubes?

Should I put in pieces of cardboard just for them to chew on?

Sirotan posted:

^^^^ Jesus christ

Black Friday pet supply protip: Now is a great time to ditch the carefresh or pine shavings and switch your piggies over to fleece and towels as bedding. Fabric stores like Joann's or Michael's have fleece at 50% off on Black Friday. I'm moving in ~1 month and when I do my pig cage is going to get a remodel so I'll be stocking up on some cute new fleece on BF. I'm lame so buying fleece for pigs will probably be the only line I'll stand in all day.

Serella posted:

Sometimes it takes another person to help you hold them because even veggies won't distract them.

kazmeyer posted:

You can actually get the pulp to recede by trimming nails frequently; clip a little bit at a time, and the blood line will gradually shrink. You have to do that for pigs with overgrown nails, or else you draw blood every time.

Sirotan posted:

http://monroemi.craigslist.org/for/2130579031.html

kazmeyer posted:

How skinny are we talking? Pig physiology is just different sometimes; I had one girl that regularly tipped the scales at 1.5 kilos and another who never broke 1 kilogram in her life. You could always take the skinnier pig out for treats if you were really worried - Oxbow makes these vegetable biscuits that pigs seem to love, and one or two of those a day might make the difference.

Also, do you have multiple food bowls? If the two younger pigs are crowding out the older one, a second bowl might help.