Guinea Pig Cages - The Most Commonly Overlooked Factor in Selecting a Cage2412623
When you go buying for a guinea pig cage, what are the things you consider? Colour? Cost? An attractive design? People choose 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 factor in choosing a guinea pig cage appears to be cage size. Certain, individuals may think they appear at cage size when buying a cage. But, judging by the number of small, "standard" pet store cages nonetheless being bought each year, it is clear that individuals do not truly look at cage size.
Let's do a little thought experiment. The average guinea pig is about 9 to 15 inches in length. The average height for a human is roughly 5'4" to 5'10". An average pet store cage is 24-inches by 16-inches.
Put yourself in your pig's location. An equivalent size room for you would be approximately eight-ft by 12-feet - the size of a large bathroom or a little bedroom. So, living your entire life in a big bathroom or small bedroom might not appear horrible - but it would definitely be a challenge to get a substantial quantity of physical exercise in a space that small.
An additional related factor that I'm convinced that individuals do not consider 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 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 each side. That might be equivalent to building a seven-foot by seven-foot storage shed and putting it our hypothetical equivalent space 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 - 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 some thing the size of a hot water heater standing in the corner of our equivalent room.
A hay rack is has a footprint of roughly 4 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 room and placing them side-by side.
Does this sound like a lot of space? Does it sound like someplace you would like to invest the rest of your life? Let us evaluation.
We begin by moving into an eight x 12 space - an region roughly the size of a large bathroom or a small bedroom. Next we place 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 location 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 area in which to live. And, worst of all, our well being starts to endure because exercise becomes a almost not possible job.
