Guinea Pig Cages - The Most Generally Overlooked Aspect in Selecting a Cage7983001
When you go buying for a guinea pig cage, what are the issues you consider? Colour? Cost? An attractive design? Individuals choose their cages based upon many various criteria. Nevertheless, there is one very essential aspect that frequently gets overlooked or ignored.
The most generally overlooked factor in selecting a guinea pig cage seems to be cage size. Certain, people might think they look at cage size when buying a cage. But, judging by the number of small, "standard" pet store cages still being purchased each year, it is clear that people do not truly appear at cage size.
Let's do a small 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 average pet shop cage is 24-inches by 16-inches.
Put yourself in your pig's place. An equivalent size space for you would be approximately eight-ft by 12-feet - the size of a big bathroom or a small bedroom. So, living your whole life in a big bathroom or small bedroom might not appear horrible - but it would definitely be a challenge to get a significant amount of physical exercise in a space that small.
Another related aspect 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 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 may 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'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 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 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 placing them side-by side.
Does this sound like a lot of space? Does it sound like someplace you would like to spend the rest of your life? Let us evaluation.
We begin by moving into an 8 x 12 space - an region roughly the size of a big bathroom or a small bedroom. Subsequent we place 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 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 extremely little and cramped region in which to live. And, worst of all, our health starts to endure because physical exercise becomes a nearly not possible job.
