Guinea Pig Cages - The Most Generally Overlooked Aspect in Selecting a Cage4080280
When you go buying for a guinea pig cage, what are the issues you think about? Colour? Cost? An appealing design? Individuals choose their cages based upon numerous different criteria. However, there is one very important factor that frequently gets overlooked or ignored.
The most generally overlooked aspect in selecting a guinea pig cage appears to be cage size. Certain, individuals might think they look at cage size when purchasing a cage. But, judging by the number of small, "regular" pet shop cages still becoming bought every year, it is clear that people do not truly appear 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 typical pet store cage is 24-inches by 16-inches.
Place yourself in your pig's location. An equivalent size space for you would be approximately 8-ft by 12-feet - the size of a large bathroom or a small bedroom. So, living your entire life in a large bathroom or little bedroom may not appear horrible - but it would certainly be a challenge to get a significant quantity of physical exercise in a space that little.
An additional associated factor 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 meals 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 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 - 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 something 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 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 room? Does it sound like someplace you would like to invest the rest of your life? Let us evaluation.
We begin by moving into an 8 x 12 room - an area roughly the size of a large 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 small and cramped region in which to live. And, worst of all, our health begins to endure because physical exercise becomes a nearly not possible task.
