What my guinea pigs eat : Pellets

My three love their pellets, any clinking sound of their food bowls will immediately trigger much excited scurrying round. Sometimes when I start dishing out for them before I fence them off (after cage cleaning), they run in frenzied circles around my feet like tiny dogs ^_^

 Hmmnomnomnom! Sylbie has such a good natured face…

 This is how Poe eats - she shoves her face into the bowl and doesn’t lift it until she’s eaten all the tasty bits.

Everyone gets their own bowl, else they bicker and Tiramisu will usually miss out. I tend to put down the bowls starting from the right. Sylbie has now wised up and runs to the far left to wait for the blue bowl so she doesn’t have to squish with the youngsters. And yes, their food bowls are ashtrays… they are hardcore like that :p 

But really - its functional, the perfect size for a guinea pig, and heavy - so no tipping.

Currently I feed my girls Cavia Nature (made by Versele Laga). I’ve previously fed them Cavia Crispy and Cavia Complete. This Guinea Lynx Forum link discusses the differences between these products more thoroughly. Cavia Crispy contains a lot of corn and wheat (possibly up to half of the product weight), which I would pick out, marking a very laborious stage of my life... Cavia Nature has less corn bits, but there are these hard round beans and the odd sunflower seed that I would pick out for fear of them choking on it. I basically fill the blue bowl (about 50g) and then distribute it evenly between the three bowls daily. 

Versele Laga is (I think) the most premium guinea pig food available in Johannesburg and Pretoria (possibly whole of South Africa?) In my experience, many pet shops and even vets are not very knowledgeable about pellets made specifically for guinea pigs and will happily tell you to feed them rabbit food. I used to feed my girls a mixture (of rabbit pellets and guinea pig pellets) because Versele is quite expensive. It is also hard to find as not many pet stores stock it. I get my pellets from Cat Box Hyper, they are by far the cheapest for both guinea pig pellets and hay. Especially hay, which some pet stores sell for R40 for a small bag that would last me a week, at Cat Box Hyper its about R18. I used to also get my supplies from Animal Kingdom (there's a branch in Pretoria) or there is a pet shop inside the massive Pick 'n Pay Hypermarket on Atterbury (Pretoria) that has competitive prices.

Nicknames

As you can see, they have Cantonese names too that my Mom likes to call them by. Sylbie is known as "Little Mom". Poe is called "Poe Zi" or "Zi Zi" (pronounced "Zai") - meaning "little Poe" or "little one" but masculine, because my Mom thinks she looks like a boy piggy. Tiramisu is called little girl ("lui lui") because she is most girly in her appearance and mannerisms.

Nail cutting

I cut my girls nails about every month or so. They haven't been weighed for awhile so I did that too. First up is Poe!

Tubby pig

Poe was great this time, look at her, she's like a small wild haired zen buddha! Sometimes when she's in a bad mood she'll wriggle and wave her arms so wildly I'm scared to constrain her for fear of hurting her.This time she was a joy.

She nibbled my hoodie string a bit afterwards. I try cuddle them afterwards and give them back scratches until they giggle to show them that we are still friends and it's not all that bad.

Sylbie's up next! Also pretty hefty piggie...

She has the cutest fat face...

Also the most goofy face...

This photo made me laugh ^_^ whenever I hold her by her tummy she splays her legs out like a chicken!

She bites the nails on her feet, so I just try to tidy up the raggedy ends...

All done!

Sylbie can make herself into a ball and kind of just roll out of my grasp. If she's impatient and wriggles too much, she basically just ends up rolling around on my lap, it's pretty hard to get a hold of her, she's too squidgy!

Finally Tiramisu. She's the lightest and smallest, but boy did she have an attitude!

She squealed for every nail I cut off, as if I was chopping off her leg! She protested so much that I had to stop a few times to make sure that I didn't accidentally cut too deeply...oh my little drama queen.

Unimpressed.

Sulking.

She cheer up later, when I gave them veggies ^_^

So that's how I cut their nails, as you can see, the easiest way I find is to hold them under the armpits, because their arms automatically stick out making it easy to peer over their heads and snip away. For their hind legs I lift them a bit higher and support their back against my chest. I try cut their nails as fast as possible, because especially with Poe and Sylbie, they've become so big that it's hard to wrap my hand around them.

Beepbeepbeeeeee...Pschoumph!

Hehe, this started out as a simple doodle, brought on by my paranoia of my piggies falling prey to some predator (in this case, a tiny cat) - so I equipped this piggy with a rocket pack - you know, so they could jet blast themselves out of reach of danger. And later, as with most things, a death ray was added...

Poe Sequence

I caught Poe all snuggled up the one morning - her blanket are old long johns - she's tucked her self under one leg and is lying on the other one, talk about cozy! so as I approached her with my camera...

Hmm, what you got there?

Is it FOOD?

OH NO WAA GET AWAY!

I love how alarmed she looks in the last photo - waaa it's not food! Sacrilege! I can always tell that they are a bit freaked out when I can see the whites of their eyes...

Mine!

Long time no post... I got swept away by the relentless waves of life. And now I'm back - hello! Finally got round to finishing this comic I started sometime last year! I tried making them more realistic this time :) I know this is a common guinea pig trait , where they always want the other piggy's food. Sylbie usually tries to drag food away to a hiding place, and Tiramisu has started standing on her veggies so it wouldn't be whipped out from under her!

The piggies are all good, there was some back and forth traveling for them in the beginning of the year between my flat and my folks' place, because of our family alternatively going on holiday... but everything's calmed down now and they have settled back into their corner of my kitchen :) Staying with my folks seem to have made them more tame, especially Sylbie, who is usually very skittish. She runs towards my hand now! (possibly because my Mom always presented them with hands full of food...) I've been really enjoying her more curious attitude towards me. Sometimes when I stroke her she relaxes completely and flops down like a water balloon :D its so cute!

Expansion of the Piggy Empire : Ramp!

This is the new ramp I put in. Why does it look like that? Well...
 a.) I'm cheap and was using scrap wood from my parents' garden (my Dad is the original scrap collector/hoarder, he's where I learnt my junk gathering skills from). So I couldn't find planks that were long enough for the ramp to reach right down to the ground without it being too steep.
b.) I didn't want all the floor space to be taken up by this massive ramp.

I was hopeful that the girls would just hop up and all their previous ramp walking knowledge would kick in, but it was a bit harder than that. Initially, the green rubber mats were not there, I merely sanded the wood surface so the piggies wouldn't get splinters. Alas, when I grabbed Poe and put her on the ramp, she managed to scramble up, but then looked down in horror from the top when she wanted to get down (she made small scared noises, I felt like a guinea pig torturer...). Tiramisu, more agile and prone to climbing things, made a mad dash up, but then my heart almost stopped as I watched her practically slide down the ramp on her way out. Aaaah! I had a mini panic, removed the ramp, and the upper storey cage became out of bounds.

A couple days passed, I found this awesome rubber mat material at my local hardware store. It came in all sorts of colours, including bright green! I secured it to the ramp with velcro, to make it easy to remove and clean. The ramp is now grippable for little piggy feet! Hooray! No one is going to slide off the end and break their legs by landing funny! (says my over active paranoia)

The ramp's been up for about 10 days, but I've only seen Sylbie use it once. I think the hop up is still too new for Poe and her, and it's also scary for them when they have to jump down. Plus I have an inkling the ramp is a bit steep... Tiramisu uses it fine (she's a little trooper), the cage has now become her private attic :)

I have a rough idea to add onto the existing ramp to make it more user friendly for the other two, once I have recovered from all the DIYing...

To see what their cage looked like before, go here