Guinea Pig Cages - The Most Generally Overlooked Factor in Choosing a Cage7486832
When you go shopping for a guinea pig cage, what are the things you consider? Color? Price? An attractive design? People choose their cages primarily based upon many various criteria. Nevertheless, there is 1 very essential aspect that often gets overlooked or ignored.
The most commonly overlooked aspect in selecting a guinea pig cage seems to be cage size. Certain, individuals may think they look at cage size when purchasing a cage. But, judging by the quantity of small, "regular" pet shop cages still becoming bought each year, it is clear that people do not really appear at cage size.
Let's do a little 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 shop cage is 24-inches by 16-inches.
Place yourself in your pig's location. An equivalent size room for you would be roughly 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 certainly be a challenge to get a substantial amount of physical exercise in a space that little.
Another associated factor that I'm convinced that individuals 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 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 may be equivalent to building a seven-foot by seven-foot storage shed and placing it our hypothetical equivalent room with us.
Add a meals dish to your pig's cage (about half the size of your pig) and it's 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 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 four 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 putting 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 begin by moving into an eight x 12 room - an area roughly the size of a large bathroom or a little 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 place 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 small and cramped region in which to live. And, worst of all, our well being starts to suffer because physical exercise becomes a almost not possible task.
