N is for Never Do This! #AtoZChallenge

Hello, I’m Pippin, and I’m a guinea pig. Today I’m going to talk about things you should never do. Most of these things are supported by science or by the Five Freedoms principles.

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.

Never use a harness

Top of the list is never use one of those cute harnesses you can buy in shops. They may be suitable for ferrets, and for very small dogs, but they aren’t suitable for guinea pigs.

The main reason is that we have very fragile bones, especially our rib cages. In fact lots of our ribs aren’t even bone, but cartilage. Very easily damaged. And if our rib cage is damaged, it will affect our breathing, and could restrict the ability of our heart to do its job too. I’ll show you my ribs in the letter X.

So if you put a harness on, and pull on it, you could do as much damage to us as if you dropped us on our sides. We don’t need to be led around. Mummy thinks Dylan and Roscoe might have enjoyed it, and she’d have been very careful, but it’s far too dangerous if they take fright at something and pull away suddenly. How would you like a seriously injured animal hanging on the end of your lead?

Never put guinea pigs in clothes

For a very simple reason: we are not dolls. This is against the Five Freedoms – our freedom to be guinea pigs. There was a book once which dressed us up with hats and took photos for a Guinea Pig Nativity. Lots of people bought it, so they did another one called Pride and Prejudice, which had pigs in bonnets and dresses, and jackets with their legs through the clothes to make it look like arms… Horrible. And there were more. Mummy did a review and said they should be banned, but somebody sent her one relatively recently and she was extremely angry.

Mummy does provide us with Christmas hats for our seasonal photos. These sit on our heads and are not attached. We do look cute. She has a Christmas hat too, so we mostly go along with it. But Colman absolutely refused to wear his hat, and shook it straight off. So if you want to drape a cloak over us, if we can walk out of it, okay. But not clothes.

Never feed us iceberg lettuce, or things you aren’t sure of

Iceberg lettuce is one of the commonest lettuces in shops. I don’t know why humans eat it, because it has no food value other than water, plus a fairly hefty dose of any heavy metals in the land it’s grown in. It also contains Laudanum, which is a sleeping drug, and is addictive. Many lettuces have very small amounts of laudanum, but Iceberg is more than a very small amount.

Leaves you aren’t sure of… whether you aren’t sure of what they are, or what they’ve been watered with. Many things that look nice at the side of a road are dirty with traffic dust and fumes, and may have been sprayed with weedkiller. Many nice footpaths with lovely grass at the side are also used by dogs, who are in the habit of weeing on it and leaving messages for other dogs. Actually if you gave us that we would probably realise, and leave it, but it would contaminate anything else in our cages and you wouldn’t realise.

If you aren’t sure what the leaves are, please don’t try us on it, since we might not recognise them either. We might recognise buttercup leaves, ragwort leaves (when small they look like they might be frilly dandelions), and daisies, but we might not know other things. There are good wild plants we can eat, so please check them out and know which is which. We have a list of good and bad plants for P.

Surely we would leave things we think are bad for us, you ask. Well, we would if we know it’s bad for us, or we might nibble something to test it. Which would be really bad if it was deadly nightshade/belladonna or monkshood/wolfsbane (aconitum napellus). Lots of dogs have died from trying aconite in their owners’ gardens.

Never hold us badly

I know Mummy wants to put something in the book about how to hold a pig, but she didn’t give it to me for H, so I’m including it in the Nevers.

Never pick us up by our front end, or shoulders. Our back ends are heavy, because that’s where all the work goes on. You can actually break our backs if you pull us by our front ends and leave the bottom dangling. Even if our skeleton stays whole, according to Dr John Chitty, the top zoological vet, lots of internal damage is caused to the liver and spleen by incorrect handling. They can be quite brittle in guineas. I don’t think brittle was exactly his word, but he meant they didn’t bend or stretch easily, and any damage takes a long time to kill us. Which could be very painful.

So always support our bottom ends, even if you want to hold us to face you like Auntie Pigpog did with George when she met him.