Guinea Pig Cages - The Most Generally Overlooked Aspect in Choosing a Cage2112224
When you go buying for a guinea pig cage, what are the things you consider? Color? Price? An appealing design? People choose their cages primarily based upon many different criteria. However, there is one very essential aspect that frequently gets overlooked or ignored.
The most commonly overlooked factor in choosing a guinea pig cage appears to be cage size. Sure, individuals may think they look at cage size when buying a cage. But, judging by the quantity of small, "regular" pet shop cages still becoming purchased every year, it is clear that people do not truly look at cage size.
Let's do a little thought experiment. The typical guinea pig is about 9 to 15 inches in length. The typical height for a human is roughly 5'4" to 5'10". An typical pet shop cage is 24-inches by 16-inches.
Place yourself in your pig's location. An equivalent size room for you would be approximately 8-ft by 12-feet - the size of a large bathroom or a little bedroom. So, living your whole life in a large bathroom or small bedroom might not seem horrible - but it would certainly be a challenge to get a significant amount of physical exercise in a space that small.
An additional related aspect that I am convinced that individuals do not think about 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 might be equivalent to developing a seven-foot by seven-foot storage shed and placing it our hypothetical equivalent space 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 space.
Of course we're going to need a water bottle. This would be roughly equivalent to something the size of a hot water heater standing in the corner of our equivalent room.
A hay rack is has a footprint of roughly 4 by seven inches. So adding a hay rack to the wall might be roughly equivalent to pushing a couple of nightstands up against 1 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 invest the rest of your life? Let us evaluation.
We begin by moving into an 8 x 12 room - an area roughly the size of a big bathroom or a little bedroom. Subsequent we place up a 7x7 storage shed in the corner. This leaves us with an eight-foot by 5-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 extremely little and cramped region in which to reside. And, worst of all, our health begins to suffer because exercise becomes a nearly not possible job.
