Guinea Pig Cages - The Most Commonly Overlooked Factor in Selecting a Cage9050462
When you go buying for a guinea pig cage, what are the things you consider? Color? Price? An attractive design? People select their cages based upon numerous different criteria. Nevertheless, there is one very essential factor that often gets overlooked or ignored.
The most generally overlooked factor in selecting a guinea pig cage seems to be cage size. Certain, individuals may think they appear at cage size when purchasing a cage. But, judging by the quantity of little, "standard" pet shop cages nonetheless being bought each year, it is clear that individuals do not really look at cage size.
Let's do a small thought experiment. The average guinea pig is about 9 to 15 inches in length. The average height for a human is roughly 5'4" to 5'10". An average pet shop cage is 24-inches by 16-inches.
Put your self in your pig's location. An equivalent size room for you would be roughly 8-ft by 12-feet - the size of a large bathroom or a little bedroom. So, living your entire life in a big bathroom or small bedroom might not appear horrible - but it would definitely be a challenge to get a substantial amount of exercise in a space that little.
Another related factor that I am convinced that individuals do not consider when sizing a cage are the additional 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 perhaps ten to 12-inches on each side. That may be equivalent to developing a seven-foot by seven-foot storage shed and placing it our hypothetical equivalent room with us.
Add a meals dish to your pig's cage (about half the size of your pig) and it's like throwing a kiddie pool - 3-feet in diameter in the middle of the floor in our room.
Of course we're going to need 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 may be roughly equivalent to pushing a couple of nightstands up against one of the walls in our hypothetical equivalent room and putting 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 small bedroom. Subsequent we put up a 7x7 storage shed in the corner. This leaves us with an eight-foot by five-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 location a three-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 area in which to reside. And, worst of all, our well being starts to suffer because physical exercise becomes a nearly not possible task.
