8.11.2011

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. 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. We 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.

Fellow piggies, how big is your cage?


4 comments:

  1. I would love to build a C&C cage for my horrors- at the moment they have daily floortime and lawntime. Does anyone know if the "cube" parts are sold in the UK?

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  2. Hi Mopsy, our humans buy these cube grids from Bed Bath & Beyond here in the US: http://www.bedbathandbeyond.com/product.asp?SKU=16719773&RN=1009&

    However since we doubt that is available in the UK we did a search and came up with this info: http://www.theguineapigforum.co.uk/showthread.php?t=17001

    Based on what we found this seems to be the most equivalent:
    http://www.amazon.co.uk/White-Wire-Cube-Storage-System/dp/B0050SVZ9M/ref=sr_1_1?s=kitchen&ie=UTF8&qid=1313204159&sr=1-1

    Hope that helps! Feel free to let us know if you have any questions or need any help :)

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  3. Do you line the box of hay with anything (newspaper, carefresh)? My guinea pigs always poop/pee in their cozies and everywhere else. Do your pigs do their business in one place only?

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  4. Hi Vegan Wheekers -

    Our humans just cut holes at the bottom and sides of the hay boxes and refilled it with a lot of hay pretty often. After it got soiled they just composted it since they're made of cardboard.

    All of us (Belka, Poof, Peaches and Truffle) also pee and poop everywhere - however, whee started going almost exclusively inside our hay boxes, so our humans took them away and switched us to hay racks instead. That's been working pretty well, since minimal hay gets on the fleece. Don't have a picture of this yet, but Guineapigcages has some great hay dispensing solutions: http://www.guineapigcages.com/photos/showgallery.php?cat=520

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