Guinea Pig Cages - The Most Commonly Overlooked Factor in Choosing a Cage3408052
When you go buying for a guinea pig cage, what are the things you think about? Colour? Cost? An attractive style? People choose their cages primarily based upon numerous different criteria. However, there is 1 very essential aspect that frequently gets overlooked or ignored.
The most generally overlooked factor in choosing a guinea pig cage appears to be cage size. Certain, people might believe they look at cage size when buying a cage. But, judging by the quantity of little, "regular" pet shop cages still becoming purchased each year, it is clear that people do not really look at cage size.
Let's do a small believed 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 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 big bathroom or a little bedroom. So, living your entire life in a big bathroom or small bedroom may not appear horrible - but it would certainly be a challenge to get a substantial quantity of exercise in a space that small.
Another related aspect that I'm 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 space. When we add a nest box to our pig's cage, we are adding an item that is maybe ten to 12-inches on every 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 meals 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 room.
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 room.
A hay rack is has a footprint of approximately 4 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 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 eight x 12 room - an region roughly the size of a big bathroom or a little bedroom. Subsequent 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 small and cramped region in which to reside. And, worst of all, our well being begins to endure because exercise becomes a nearly not possible task.
