Guinea Pig Cages - The Most Commonly Overlooked Factor in Choosing a Cage7723912
When you go shopping for a guinea pig cage, what are the things you think about? Color? Price? An attractive style? Individuals choose their cages primarily based upon numerous various criteria. However, there is one extremely essential factor that frequently gets overlooked or ignored.
The most commonly overlooked aspect in choosing a guinea pig cage seems to be cage size. Certain, people might think they look at cage size when purchasing a cage. But, judging by the quantity of little, "standard" pet shop cages still being purchased every year, it is clear that people do not really 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 typical pet shop cage is 24-inches by 16-inches.
Place yourself in your pig's place. An equivalent size space for you would be roughly 8-ft by 12-feet - the size of a big bathroom or a little bedroom. So, living your entire life in a big bathroom or little bedroom might not appear horrible - but it would definitely be a challenge to get a substantial quantity of exercise in a space that little.
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 requires - such as a nest box, a meals dish and a hay rack.
So let's return to our hypothetical equivalent space. When we add a nest box to our pig's cage, we are adding an item that is maybe 10 to 12-inches on every side. That may be equivalent to developing a seven-foot by seven-foot storage shed and placing 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's like throwing a kiddie pool - 3-feet in diameter in the middle of the floor in our room.
Of course we're going to need a water bottle. This would be roughly equivalent to some thing 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 might be roughly equivalent to pushing a couple of nightstands up against one of the walls in our hypothetical equivalent space and putting them side-by side.
Does this sound like a lot of room? Does it sound like someplace you would like to invest the rest of your life? Let us review.
We begin by moving into an 8 x 12 room - an region roughly the size of a big bathroom or a small bedroom. Next we put up a 7x7 storage shed in the corner. This leaves us with an eight-foot by 5-foot space in front of the shed and a useless 1-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 extremely small and cramped region in which to reside. And, worst of all, our health begins to suffer simply because physical exercise becomes a almost impossible job.
