What do guinea pigs eat, and how much. And what should they eat, because most of us will try anything that smells nice. And we’ll gnaw on all sorts of things. Many like wood, treated or not. Some pigs like plastic bags (Hugo and Victor the Red), some pigs like plastic covered wires (Hugo and Victor and Roscoe) and none of those are good for them. Don’t let them go anywhere near them.

Hello, I’m Pippin, and I’m a guinea pig. I’m helping out Mummy, Jemima Pett, who is doing the A2Z this year by putting together all the posts we’ve done here on George’s Guinea Pig World, to make a book on Guinea Pig Care from A to Z. You can see her posts here: jemimapett.com/blog/. We’re filling in the gaps this month.

Victor did a really good post of what to eat in his 2024 A to Z post.

Hay, pellet food, vegetables and water

At least 75% of our intake should be hay. Good quality, dust-free, not too hard and not too soft, Apart from the fun we have foraging in it, and hiding it it, we eat it in large quantities. We do not have fat bellies, we have large combustion chambers turning hay into compost. And it keeps our bodies warm, all that processing energy.

You can add dried grass like Readigrass, and dried herb and flower salad mixes into that group, too. They are very tasty and make life interesting as we hunt through the hay for them.

Eating hay keeps our teeth ground down. Our teeth grow continuously, and we need hay to help stop them.

Pellet food is best as most are good quality, and ensure we get all the extra minerals and vitamins we might need. We don’t need a lot. A small handful a day per pig is more than enough. Most of us will leave the bowl if we’ve had enough, although some pigs are greedy guts and finish it all. There are mixes for indoor pigs to offset the lack of vitamin D, and for older pigs, who benefit from additives for bones and bladder issues. Muesli mixes used to be popular, but it means we can pick out the things we like (often the more fattening things) and leave the rest, which may be the bits that are actually good for us.

Pellet foods usually have a ‘use by’ date on them, because they have extra Vitamin C added. Vitamin C only lives for six months, so if food is older, it won’t have much vitamin C. You can still use it, but make sure we are getting our vitamin C from fresh vegetables.

Vegetables and fruit

Mummy says she is doing a special part of each letter section with the fruits and vegetables. There are loads of posts on favourite fruits and vegetables here. Apparently we are very fussy eaters. She says other pigs ate a far wider range of food than we do. She understands that Ronnie and Reggie may not have had too much variety when they were in Rescue, but she’s surprised when I find something strange,. I’m always suspicious of new foods, but with Mummy, it’s usually worth trying them. She’s surprised I still don’t like beetroot though. Or apple. I like banana, though. I’m glad she tried me with that. And she sometimes give us Swiss chard, which is lovely, but Ronnie and Reggie have never had it before and think it might be poison.

How much?

Loads of hay. A small handful of pellets, whether in a bowl or scattered around for us to find. Vegetables – Mummy says use the five portions a day rule. She says you’ll understand that. And water, plenty of water at all times. Clean. In bowls and bottles that arent growing green veg of their own in them. More on Water later.

When? Hay, always. Keep it topped up as necessary. Veggies, whenever it suits you will suit us, but we like things at the same time every day. I mean, surprises are nice, but meals are best when they come when expected, don’t you think?

But what we really really love is fresh grass. Clean, with healthy weeds in it, and no dust or spray from roads or pesticides. Please don’t feed your grass. And don’t mow it and give us the clippings – they are likely to be contaminated and/or start fermenting too quickly and make us ill. Mummy takes the scissors and a bowl out to cut and collect tufts of grass for us if we can’t go out. With dandelion leaves! Yum.