Guinea Pig Cages - The Most Commonly Overlooked Aspect in Selecting a Cage7231245
When you go buying for a guinea pig cage, what are the issues you consider? Colour? Price? An appealing design? People choose their cages based upon many various criteria. However, there is 1 very essential factor that frequently gets overlooked or ignored.
The most generally overlooked factor in choosing a guinea pig cage seems to be cage size. Sure, individuals may believe they appear at cage size when buying a cage. But, judging by the quantity of little, "regular" pet shop cages nonetheless becoming purchased each year, it is clear that individuals do not truly look at cage size.
Let's do a small thought experiment. The average guinea pig is about 9 to 15 inches in length. The typical height for a human is roughly 5'4" to 5'10". An average pet shop cage is 24-inches by 16-inches.
Put your self in your pig's place. An equivalent size space for you would be roughly 8-ft by 12-feet - the size of a large bathroom or a small bedroom. So, living your entire life in a big bathroom or small bedroom may not seem horrible - but it would definitely be a challenge to get a significant quantity of exercise in a space that small.
An additional related factor that I am convinced that people do not think about when sizing a cage are the additional accessories that your pig demands - such as a nest box, a food dish and a hay rack.
So let's return to our hypothetical equivalent room. When we add a nest box to our pig's cage, we are adding an item that is perhaps 10 to 12-inches on each side. That may be equivalent to building a seven-foot by seven-foot storage shed and putting it our hypothetical equivalent room with us.
Add a meals dish to your pig's cage (about half the size of your pig) and it is like throwing a kiddie pool - three-feet in diameter in the middle of the floor in our room.
Of course we're going to require a water bottle. This would be roughly equivalent to something the size of a hot water heater standing in the corner of our equivalent space.
A hay rack is has a footprint of roughly four by seven inches. So adding a hay rack to the wall may be roughly equivalent to pushing a couple of nightstands up against one of the walls in our hypothetical equivalent room and placing them side-by side.
Does this sound like a lot of room? Does it sound like someplace you would like to spend the rest of your life? Let us review.
We begin by moving into an 8 x 12 space - an region roughly the size of a large bathroom or a small bedroom. Subsequent we place up a 7x7 storage shed in the corner. This leaves us with an eight-foot by five-foot space in front of the shed and a useless one-foot by seven-foot narrow strip along the side of the shed.
Then, to make matters worse, we place a three-foot wading pool, a water heater and two nightstands in our remaining 8x5 living space. What does this leave us with? We are left with a very little and cramped region in which to live. And, worst of all, our well being begins to suffer because exercise becomes a nearly not possible task.
