Guinea Pig Cages - The Most Generally Overlooked Aspect in Choosing a Cage9976339
When you go shopping for a guinea pig cage, what are the issues you think about? Color? Cost? An appealing design? People select their cages primarily based upon many various criteria. However, there is one extremely important aspect that frequently gets overlooked or ignored.
The most commonly overlooked aspect 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 store cages still becoming purchased each year, it is clear that people do not truly look at cage size.
Let's do a little thought experiment. The typical guinea pig is about 9 to 15 inches in length. The average height for a human is roughly 5'4" to 5'10". An typical pet shop cage is 24-inches by 16-inches.
Put yourself in your pig's place. An equivalent size room for you would be approximately eight-ft by 12-feet - the size of a big bathroom or a small bedroom. So, living your whole 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 little.
Another related aspect that I am convinced that people do not consider 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 ten to 12-inches on every side. That may be equivalent to developing a seven-foot by seven-foot storage shed and putting it our hypothetical equivalent room with us.
Add a food 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 4 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 evaluation.
We start by moving into an eight x 12 room - an region roughly the size of a large bathroom or a little bedroom. Next 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 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 very small and cramped region in which to live. And, worst of all, our health starts to endure because physical exercise becomes a nearly impossible task.
