Guinea Pig Cages - The Most Generally Overlooked Factor in Choosing a Cage6863050
When you go buying for a guinea pig cage, what are the issues you think about? Colour? Price? An appealing design? Individuals select their cages based upon many various criteria. Nevertheless, there is one very important factor that frequently gets overlooked or ignored.
The most commonly overlooked aspect in selecting a guinea pig cage seems to be cage size. Sure, people might think they appear at cage size when buying a cage. But, judging by the quantity of small, "standard" pet store cages still becoming bought every year, it is clear that individuals do not really look at cage size.
Let's do a little thought experiment. The typical guinea pig is about 9 to 15 inches in length. The average height for a human is roughly 5'4" to 5'10". An typical pet store cage is 24-inches by 16-inches.
Put yourself in your pig's location. An equivalent size space for you would be roughly 8-ft by 12-feet - the size of a large bathroom or a small bedroom. So, living your whole life in a big bathroom or little bedroom may not appear horrible - but it would certainly be a challenge to get a significant amount of physical exercise in a space that little.
An additional related aspect that I am convinced that individuals do not consider when sizing a cage are the extra 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 10 to 12-inches on every side. That may be equivalent to building 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 is like throwing a kiddie pool - three-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 four 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 placing them side-by side.
Does this sound like a lot of room? 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 area roughly the size of a big bathroom or a little 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 one-foot by seven-foot narrow strip along the side of the shed.
Then, to make matters worse, we location a 3-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 live. And, worst of all, our well being starts to suffer because physical exercise becomes a almost not possible task.
