Pellets: Guinea Pig food mix

[ssskyy]

Hello, I'm from Australia. I've been to both produce stores where I live and they both sell the same Guinea Pig food mix, it is supposedly a complete meal with everything the pigs need in it. The food is bought in bulk, bagged into smaller 1kg or 2kg bags and only labelled as "Guinea Pig Food" so there are no ingredients listed on the bag. So I asked to know what the ingredients were, met with strange looks so they get down a huge 20kg bag of feed and I read the label, they seem annoyed and say it's what everyone buys to feed their guinea pigs & they need a complete mix like this so I buy the minimum of 1kg to try. At one of the stores the guy gave me the ingredients label to take home, this is it:

INGREDIENTS: Oats, whole sunflower seeds, roasted barley flakes(roasted through a micronising process and then covered in molasses to produce a product that is highly digestible & very palatable), copra meal, lucerne and oaten chaff, cottonseed meal, maize, essential vitamins and minerals and molasses.

Fed it to our GPs and on day two one of our girl GPs (about 2-3 months old) starts making a painful squeal when trying to poop. The only changes to their diet was the Mix I'd bought and a bag of pasture hay I found in the pet section of a department store. Thinking that the grass hay is one of the best foods for GPs... it must be the GP Food Mix so I read the label again and noticed it says: WORK HORSE MIX. Warning: Feed only toworking horses. Do not feed to any other animals or birds. So I go back to the produce store I got it from & they give me more strange looks & say it's absolutely fine for GPs because their dietary needs are similar to horses & their digestive systems are similar too.
Anyway, stopped feeding our GPs this mix and after 2 days our little girl GP is pooping normally again. This mix has sunflower seeds still in their black husks, wouldn't that be hard for a GP to eat/digest? What about the other ingredients, do you agree it is safe for them, or should I throw it away?

[Ly&Pigs]

You should toss it and get some high quality plain pellets. Oxbow is a great brand if you can manage to find it where you are. The ingredients in this stuff are unsuitable for guinea pigs.

Oats, sunflower seeds, maize (corn), oat chaff, roasted barley flakes are all to be avoided. Mixes like that cause choking hazards, obesity and aren't good for them at all.

[pigsforlife]

If you can hunt down Oxbow your girls will love you for it! It is pricey although if you are on the east coast of Australia it is cheaper than what I can get it for on the west. This is because Oxbows Australian representative is situated in QLD. Do a search for their website (Oxbow australia) to find out information about the products they have available and also places that stock it.

A lot of petstores carry grain mixes and some pellet brands that are just full of pure junk. There is also a lot of misinformation about guinea pigs out there, particularly in Australia to do with not only their diet but also their housing. There seems to be a general view that they should be outside in lawn runs fed scraps of vegetables etc.

I used to feed a grain mix before finding out about Oxbow and locating a local vet that sells it. The change when I switched them onto the Oxbow was almost immediate. It took them awhile to warm up to the new food but they now devour it. Their coats have become more shiney and I think it has also contributed to their overall health improving.

And yes, you are right - guinea pigs do find grains hard to digest.