Buying A Guinea Pig? Think About His Housing First

If you’re looking for the perfect pet for adults and for children why not consider a guinea pig? Guinea pigs make a fine pet, but before you buy a piggy or 2 spent some time researching guinea pig hutches, because the hutch you house your guinea pig in is very important.

You can keep a guinea pig both indoors or outdoors, though if you keep him outdoors he can suffer from both excess cold and heat. You will keep him outdoors in aguinea pig hutch, though either indoors or outdoors you need to be aware of several things.

The majority of people buy a guinea pig hutch from their pet shop or off the Internet, which is fine unless you buy one of the very small cages available, which is most common because these are the cheapest. However most guinea pig cages are way too small and do not provide sufficient space for him to play or exercise in. You must make an effort to house your guinea pigs properly with sufficient space.

One way to overcome this problem is to build your own guinea pig hutch, and if you can scrounge simple second-hand materials you can do so very successfully and quite cheaply, and can make him a nice large cage.

But even if you provide your guinea pig with a nice large hutch he will still need some entertainment, and the best way to provide entertainment is to provide a companion. But you also need to understand which sexes go together successfully and which do not.

If you put 2 males together you can have fighting, and if you put a male with a female you’ll end up with lots of baby guinea pigs unless you desex one of them, or unless you separate them which defeats the whole purpose. The best combination is to buy 2 young females and house them together.

You should provide them with hay in their hutch, as well as playthings such as plastic pipes and small boxes with openings so that they can run in and out. They also need something to chew on as they chew to reduce the length of their teeth and if you don’t provide something for this purpose they will chew on something anyway, probably the hutch.

Guinea pigs make fine pets. However a little forethought is necessary when choosing their hutch, to ensure you have one of inadequate size with plenty of playthings, and you need to know how many guinea pigs will go in the hutch and what sexes they will be before you buy.