Guinea Pig Cages - The Most Commonly Overlooked Factor in Selecting a Cage2217034
When you go shopping for a guinea pig cage, what are the issues you think about? Colour? Cost? An appealing design? Individuals select their cages based upon many various criteria. However, there is 1 very essential aspect that frequently gets overlooked or ignored.
The most commonly overlooked factor in choosing a guinea pig cage appears to be cage size. Sure, individuals might think they appear at cage size when purchasing a cage. But, judging by the quantity of small, "regular" pet store cages nonetheless being purchased every year, it is clear that people do not really appear 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 store cage is 24-inches by 16-inches.
Place your self in your pig's location. An equivalent size room for you would be roughly 8-ft by 12-feet - the size of a large bathroom or a little bedroom. So, living your whole life in a large bathroom or small bedroom might not appear horrible - but it would definitely be a challenge to get a substantial amount of exercise in a space that little.
Another related aspect 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 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 maybe 10 to 12-inches on each 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 is 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 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 4 by seven inches. So adding a hay rack to the wall may be roughly equivalent to pushing a couple of nightstands up against 1 of the walls in our hypothetical equivalent room and putting them side-by side.
Does this sound like a lot of space? 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 room - an area roughly the size of a big bathroom or a small 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 extremely small and cramped region in which to reside. And, worst of all, our well being begins to suffer simply because exercise becomes a nearly impossible task.
