Guinea Pig Cages - The Most Generally Overlooked Aspect in Choosing a Cage937414
When you go buying for a guinea pig cage, what are the things you consider? Colour? Cost? An attractive design? People select their cages based upon many various criteria. However, there is one very important factor that frequently gets overlooked or ignored.
The most generally overlooked factor in choosing a guinea pig cage seems to be cage size. Certain, people may think they appear at cage size when buying a cage. But, judging by the quantity of little, "regular" pet shop cages nonetheless being bought every year, it is clear that individuals do not truly look 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 typical pet shop cage is 24-inches by 16-inches.
Place your self in your pig's location. An equivalent size space for you would be approximately 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 little bedroom might not appear horrible - but it would certainly be a challenge to get a substantial amount of physical exercise in a space that small.
An additional associated factor that I am convinced that individuals do not consider when sizing a cage are the extra 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 10 to 12-inches on each side. That might be equivalent to developing a seven-foot by seven-foot storage shed and placing 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's like throwing a kiddie pool - 3-feet in diameter in the middle of the floor in our space.
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 space.
A hay rack is has a footprint of approximately four 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 space and putting them side-by side.
Does this sound like a lot of room? Does it sound like someplace you would like to invest the rest of your life? Let us review.
We begin by moving into an 8 x 12 room - an region roughly the size of a big bathroom or a small bedroom. Next we put 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 very little and cramped region in which to reside. And, worst of all, our well being starts to endure simply because physical exercise becomes a almost impossible task.
