I just can't figure out a way to approach this. The reasoning that because other people do it and their animals survive, that what they are doing is therefore equal to what I'm doing is faulty.
You simply cannot ignore the fact that guinea pigs, however tiny and inexpensive they are, deserve a "quality of life" as much as any other creature who is held in captivity by a human being. Simply because an animal can survive in certain conditions does not mean that it does not go into slow insanity or depression.
I can't help but use zoos as an example of how faulty the reasoning is. Only 40 short years ago it was considered perfectly appropriate to force tigers, bears, lions and other large animals to live in an 8ftx10ft cage for
it's entire life. Chimpanzees, apes and orangutan's were house in similar cages, on cement slabs and fed "monkey chow" from Purina as their sole source of food. Giraffes, gizelles, and other grazing animals were housed in small paddocks where the idea of running would be preposterous. At night, they moved them into barns on cement floors.
Would you consider THESE acceptable conditions for these amazing creatures? Would you expect to walk into a zoo today and see animals housed in such squalid conditions? You shouldn't. Simply because over the slow development of zoos, they began to realize that people simply found no joy in looking at the OBVIOUS and PAINFUL effects it had on those animals. As a child, I HATED the zoo. In 1967 the Sacramento Zoo was a horrible place to go. I do not know what to call it besides having an empathic streak in me, but when I saw those animals I could FEEL that it was wrong. I could sense at the age of 5 that there was something horribly wrong with the place. It wasn't fun to see the animals at all. It was depressing and painful and I never wanted to go. In those days, the school took you on a field trip every year. I hated it.
Over the last 4 decades zoo's have transformed themselves. They have learned that their animals are HEALTHIER, live LONGER, and have SANITY so they are EASIER TO HANDLE. This isn't an OPINION. This is what happened.
This is precisely what is happening in the guinea pig world. There was a time BEFORE THE INTERNET, when the people who spoke for the guinea pigs were NOT the pet owners. They were 2 groups of people. The animal researchers and the breeders who supplied animals to them. They were the people who decided what the "appropriate sized" cage was and what the appropriate diet was.
What do you THINK was their main concern? First, that the animals cost the least possible, require the least amount of energy to maintain, and take up the least amount of space possible. Since
cavies can survive in amazingly small amount of space, these researcher/breeders found it very convenient for them to do their work with vast numbers of animals. The longevity of the animals was not known in those days. So, when animals housed under such conditions average 2-4 years of life--that is what they decided how long to expect them to live. When they got bumblefoot all the time because they housed them on wire floors, then these people simply decided that guinea pigs were "prone" to bumblefoot/foot fungus. The fact that what they were doing is what was causing the problem in the first place simply wasn't considered, since the breeders were the ones who told them how to house the animals. It took years for people to put two and two together.
Now, even ANIMAL RESEARCHERS understand that they have a responsibility to provide appropriate living conditions for guinea pigs, and that the way it was done in the past is WRONG.
Even in prisons, they know that what it does to a human being to lock them in a small room.
Guinea pigs are grazing animals. To insist that because breeders ignore that fact, and use tiny cages to house them so that they can keep as many as possible in as small of space as possible is no excuse to ignore that basic personality trait. There is simply no excuse for modern people to excuse away behavior once they know it's wrong.
In the past, before the internet, there simply were not enough pet owners out there, and they were not organized so there was no way for them to scream that such conditions were completely inappropriate. Guinea pigs were kids toys, and not REAL pets and were never provided with the level of expected care that one would assume. Instead, they were relegated to a tiny cage hidden in the corrner of a bedroom. Housed in cages that many kids wouldn't even put their HAMSTERS in, forced to live on cedar chips and were never expected to live past 2 years.
Now, they are becoming an adult's pet more and more. Now pet owners feed them veggies, hay and pellets. We house them in large airy CC cages. We provide them with veterinary care. We learn about disorders, and we band together to learn as much from each other as possible. It's now common for them to live 6 years with many going up to 9 or even 10.
Where is the problem?