Guinea Pig Cages - The Most Generally Overlooked Factor in Choosing a Cage7810636
When you go buying for a guinea pig cage, what are the things you consider? Colour? Cost? An appealing style? Individuals select their cages based upon numerous different criteria. However, there is one extremely important aspect that often gets overlooked or ignored.
The most commonly overlooked factor in choosing a guinea pig cage seems to be cage size. Sure, individuals may believe they look at cage size when purchasing a cage. But, judging by the number of little, "regular" pet store cages nonetheless being purchased each year, it is clear that individuals do not truly appear at cage size.
Let's do a small 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 store cage is 24-inches by 16-inches.
Put yourself in your pig's location. An equivalent size space for you would be roughly eight-ft by 12-feet - the size of a big bathroom or a small bedroom. So, living your entire life in a large bathroom or little bedroom may not appear horrible - but it would definitely be a challenge to get a substantial quantity of physical exercise in a space that little.
Another associated factor 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 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 ten to 12-inches on every side. That may be equivalent to building a seven-foot by seven-foot storage shed and putting 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 - three-feet in diameter in the middle of the floor in our space.
Of course we're going to require 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 space.
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 putting them side-by side.
Does this sound like a lot of room? Does it sound like someplace you would like to invest 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. Next 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 place 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 extremely little and cramped region in which to reside. And, worst of all, our health starts to endure because exercise becomes a nearly impossible job.
