Guinea Pig Cages - The Most Generally Overlooked Aspect in Selecting a Cage8711051
When you go shopping for a guinea pig cage, what are the issues you think about? Colour? Cost? An appealing design? Individuals choose their cages based upon numerous different criteria. Nevertheless, there is 1 very essential factor that often gets overlooked or ignored.
The most commonly overlooked aspect in selecting a guinea pig cage appears to be cage size. Certain, individuals may think they look at cage size when buying a cage. But, judging by the quantity of little, "regular" pet store cages still being bought each year, it is clear that people do not truly look at cage size.
Let's do a little believed 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 place. An equivalent size room for you would be approximately eight-ft by 12-feet - the size of a big bathroom or a little bedroom. So, living your whole life in a big bathroom or small bedroom may not appear horrible - but it would definitely be a challenge to get a substantial quantity of physical exercise in a space that small.
Another related aspect that I'm convinced that individuals do not consider when sizing a cage are the additional accessories that your pig requires - such as a nest box, a food 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 maybe 10 to 12-inches on each side. That may be equivalent to developing a seven-foot by seven-foot storage shed and putting it our hypothetical equivalent space with us.
Add a food dish to your pig's cage (about half the size of your pig) and it's like throwing a kiddie pool - three-feet in diameter in the middle of the floor in our room.
Of course we're going to require a water bottle. This would be roughly equivalent to something the size of a hot water heater standing in the corner of our equivalent space.
A hay rack is has a footprint of approximately 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 space and placing 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 start by moving into an eight x 12 room - an area roughly the size of a large 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 extremely small and cramped area in which to live. And, worst of all, our well being starts to suffer because physical exercise becomes a nearly impossible job.
