I recently purchased a brand new guinea pig baby and without much research decided to buy a cage (figured it was absolutely necessary at the time of picking up your guinea pig). So this article: http://www.guineapighub.com/guinea-pig-cages.html says that its recommended you get a cage thats at least 7.5sq ft for a SINGLE guinea pig.
I don't even need to measure it out, but I already know that its not close to the "recommended" cage size. The reasons the article specified is because they need a lot of exercise since they're prone to obesity.
But if i regularly take them out of the cage to play in my living room, it should still be okay right? As long as they're getting their needed exercise? Any experienced piggy owners please shine in. thanks!
A long time ago when I was a little girl, I had a guinea pig. He lived in a banana box, except when I had him out to play, and he seemed to be very happy living in the banana box. It had shredded newspaper in the bottom, and he would happily burrow under the paper (there was lots of it ! ). and just peek out when he thought we might be bringing him some food.
My folks had a small neighborhood grocery, so we got new bananas every week . My mom would take the box that was empty, and put it right beside the one that my little guinea pig was living in. Then he would hop back and forth from one box to the other until he decided that he was happy in the clean box; after which we would remove the old dirty box, and mom would put that onto her compost pile to help the garden.
You know, I have wondered about that, too, now that I am long since grown up and think about those kinds of things. That little guinea pig obviously could have jumped out of the banana box at any time, and ran all around the house, but he never did. I loved the little guines pig and took him out a lot to run around and play; so maybe he got all the exercise he needed when I had him out of the box. As far as I know, he never ever tried to escape, and only jumped out when we put down the new box for him to move into.
We fed him the green outside leaves of the lettuce and he loved eating that. of course he always had his regular food as well, but when he saw one of us heading his way with lettuce leaves, he would have hs little nose up and squeaking like crazy for his special treat.
All in all, he was a wonderful little pet, and he seemed to be perfectly content living in the banana boxes.
