Guinea Pig Cages - The Most Commonly Overlooked Factor in Selecting a Cage5644271
When you go buying for a guinea pig cage, what are the things you consider? Colour? Price? An attractive design? People choose their cages primarily based upon many different criteria. However, there is 1 very 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 might believe they look at cage size when purchasing a cage. But, judging by the quantity of little, "regular" pet store cages still being purchased every year, it is clear that people do not really appear at cage size.
Let's do a little 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.
Put your self in your pig's place. 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 large bathroom or little bedroom may not seem horrible - but it would certainly be a challenge to get a substantial quantity of exercise in a space that small.
Another associated aspect that I'm convinced that people do not consider when sizing a cage are the additional 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 ten to 12-inches on each side. That may be equivalent to building 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 is like throwing a kiddie pool - 3-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 something 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 may be roughly equivalent to pushing a couple of nightstands up against one of the walls in our hypothetical equivalent space 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 review.
We start by moving into an eight x 12 space - an region roughly the size of a large bathroom or a small bedroom. Subsequent we put 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 one-foot by seven-foot narrow strip along the side of the shed.
Then, to make matters worse, we location 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 very small and cramped region in which to reside. And, worst of all, our well being starts to endure simply because exercise becomes a almost not possible task.
