Hello, I’m Pippin, and I’m a guinea pig. Today I’m going to talk about something beginning with K. Although I might ask Reggie to write about it, for a change of opinion, since I might get grumpy.

We’re helping our 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.

Kids

K is a difficult letter, because the only thing I can think of is kids.

Don’t have kids. Don’t let your guinea pigs have kids. And don’t let your kids have guinea pigs.

But, assuming that you do have guinea pigs and kids, do not assume that your kids will look after them. Kids can help you feed us and water us, and even cuddle us if shown how to do that so they don’t hurt us. We are not toys and they should not treat us as playthings. We are people with our own culture, language and customs. Please teach them to respect that.

And remember that you are the adult who is responsible for our health, welfare and wellbeing. See F for Five Freedoms.

You can teach your child how to give us our five freedoms, and how to look after us, but you are responsible for your kids and you are responsible for the way they treat us. You, the adult, are responsible for us.

Kids = neglect = kids

If you’ve read some of these blog stories before you’ll know that most of the George’s World Guinea Pigs have come from places where they were neglected, or their parents were neglected and we were the result.

Fred, George, Victor, Dylan, Dougall and I were definitely surprise babies from someone who had let a boar in with a sow.

• Dylan and Dougall were a surprise to the owner of their mum, who was ‘guaranteed to be fat not pregnant’.
• My parents were thought to be two girls, and dad wasn’t discovered and taken away from mum until he’d already made her pregnant with me – straight after my sisters were born. All five of us were born within six months. (Guinea pig pregnancy is generally 65-72 days)
• Fred and George were part of a massive rehoming where pigs had run around all over the home; boars, sows, all together. Auntie Vikki once calculated that you could easily have over 100 guinea pigs in nine months if you left them all together.
• I’m not sure about Victor (the first) but he was born at the rescue, and Vikki gave Mummy a photo of him taken on the day he was born.

I will probably tell how everyone in George’s World came to be rescued eventually, but let’s just finish this bit with one last thought:

Many kids seem to lose interest in us after somewhere between six weeks and two years, especially if we don’t live with them in the house. We live for 4 to 8 years.

No, I won’t ask Reggie to write anything else, I’ll stop there and hopefully see you tomorrow.

love

Pippin

PS. Mummy made this table:

Table of uncontrolled breeding output.

	Boar	Sow
day 1	1	1
day 68	2	3
day 136	5	9
day 204	14	27
day 272	41	81
day 340	122	243
assumes each sow produces 1 boar and 2 sows per litter	assumes no infant mortality

Guinea pigs are born ready to go. Although they are asserted to be sexually mature at 8-10 weeks, there is documented evidence of siblings becoming pregnant at 4 weeks with no other boar but their brother present. Usual practice for rescues is to separate boars and sows by the age of 6 weeks, but the risk remains.