Guinea Pig Cages - The Most Commonly Overlooked Aspect in Selecting a Cage2142343
When you go buying for a guinea pig cage, what are the issues you think about? Colour? Price? An appealing style? People choose their cages primarily based upon numerous various criteria. However, there is one extremely essential factor that frequently gets overlooked or ignored.
The most generally overlooked aspect in selecting a guinea pig cage seems to be cage size. Certain, individuals may think they appear at cage size when purchasing a cage. But, judging by the quantity of little, "standard" pet shop cages nonetheless being bought every year, it is clear that individuals do not truly appear at cage size.
Let's do a small believed 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 your self in your pig's location. 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 whole life in a large bathroom or small bedroom might not appear horrible - but it would definitely be a challenge to get a significant quantity of physical exercise in a space that little.
An additional related aspect that I am convinced that people do not think about when sizing a cage are the extra 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 space. 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 might be equivalent to developing a seven-foot by seven-foot storage shed and putting it our hypothetical equivalent space with us.
Add a food 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 space.
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 room.
A hay rack is has a footprint of approximately four by seven inches. So adding a hay rack to the wall might be roughly equivalent to pushing a couple of nightstands up against 1 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 start by moving into an eight x 12 room - an area roughly the size of a big bathroom or a little 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 place a 3-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 little and cramped area in which to reside. And, worst of all, our health starts to suffer simply because physical exercise becomes a almost impossible task.
