Today’s question is ‘How do guinea pigs keep cool?’ I’m Ludo, and I have plenty of experience of this. First I’ll cover keeping warm, which is important for outdoor pigs in cold weather

Keeping Warm

We live indoors so we don’t have much trouble with this. If Mummy has the door to the outside open on a cold day, I can get some cold air in my run, but by the time it gets to the others it’s okay. If I think it’s cold I go into my snuggle tunnel and stay there. I stay in my snuggle tunnel a lot, because it’s always a nice temperature inside. It’s like being in a burrow, really. Wild cavies (the proper name for guinea pigs) live in burrows in mountainous regions.

Every winter there is lots of guidance for people with piggies in sheds and hutches outside about what to do to make sure they okay. A big pile of hay to hide in, and check the water is not frozen seem to be the top two pieces of advice.

Keeping Cool

With the changes in the weather we are going to have to get used to summers being much hotter, and for many days at a time, so it doesn’t even cool down at night.

Mummy tries to keep the whole house cool by closing the curtains and the windows as soon as the sun comes up, and opening them when it’s dark and cooler outside. We now have a shade (or awning) outside our window door, so that keeps the sun off first thing, and gives us shade on the grass until the mid afternoon. But it still may not be enough to make it cool enough for us to go outside.

Ears

Most of our keeping cool or keeping warm is regulated by our ears. When we’re hot, there’s a bigger blood supply to our ears, and pale ears look red. When we’re cool, we don’t lose heat through our ears, but they don’t help to warm us up. Mummy sometimes feels our ears if she’s concerned about us feeling too hot. So she knows about this.

Other things

There are two more things Mummy does to help keep us cool.

The first is our blowing tower. It’s a big white post which whirrs and makes a nice wind to waft across us. I wouldn’t say it’s cool, but it relieves the heat.

The other is a cold water bottle. She puts bottles into her freezer and brings them out, wraps them in an old snuggle sack or something else fleecy, and pops one in our cage. It makes the air around it cold, and I saw Locksley snuggling up to his last year.

Locksley

Locksley is the only guinea pig here that has hairy ears. I don’t know if that’s why he feels hotter than the rest of us. But then, he’s also got a very thick coat, even in summer. Perhaps his body is the same temperature all the year round because the air temperature doesn’t affect it?

He also spends most of his time hiding in a pile of hay, whatever the temperature. Or his snuggle tunnel. No, I don’t understand either.

Midge

So that’s my answer to the question on keeping cool. If you have a question, please ask it in the comments. If we can’t fit it in for a blog letter of its own, we have two round-up posts for Q and U (questions and unanswered questions!).

Bye for now

Ludo