Guinea Pig Cages - The Most Commonly Overlooked Aspect in Selecting a Cage8338259
When you go shopping for a guinea pig cage, what are the things you consider? Color? Price? An appealing design? People choose their cages based upon many various criteria. However, there is 1 very important aspect that frequently gets overlooked or ignored.
The most commonly overlooked factor in selecting a guinea pig cage appears to be cage size. Sure, people might believe they look at cage size when buying a cage. But, judging by the number of little, "standard" pet store cages still becoming bought every year, it is clear that people do not really appear at cage size.
Let's do a small 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 store cage is 24-inches by 16-inches.
Place 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 small bedroom might not seem horrible - but it would certainly be a challenge to get a significant quantity of exercise in a space that little.
Another associated aspect that I am convinced that people 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 perhaps ten to 12-inches on each side. That might be equivalent to building a seven-foot by seven-foot storage shed and putting 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 space.
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 roughly 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 space 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 review.
We start by moving into an eight 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 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 extremely little and cramped area in which to live. And, worst of all, our health begins to endure simply because physical exercise becomes a nearly impossible task.
