Another New Member

[ava.trimble]

Hello! My name is Ava, and I live in Orange County, California - in an apartment with two other humans. This puts living space at something of a premium for all of us, and I'm in the process of trying to determine the best way to create housing for my darlings.

I've had guinea pigs most of the time since I was six (17 years ago!), and their lack of space has always bothered me. When I dove back into having piggies again three years ago, I ended up building a C&C cage...of sorts. My ex-boyfriend was involved, and his improvements tended to make things worse. This then turned into a further adventure when it turned out that one of the two guinea pigs I'd bought (at a pet store - cringe - never again!) was in fact pregnant.

After that, it turned into something of a zoo with the two original pigs, the three babies, and a dwarf rabbit too. One of the babies turned out to be a boy, but he made friends with the baby dwarf and they've been very well bonded ever since. They both seem to get rather lifeless when separated, and get on very well. The guinea pig, MJ, has a tube he can go into when the rabbit's affections get too annoying, and MJ is much snugglier than most guinea pigs, probably because he's been with Bunny since babyhood. I can only hope nothing awful like a startled kick happens, but I'd feel dreadful separating them now.

Anyway - one of the original pigs passed a couple years ago, so it was just mother and daughters for a while, and all five critters (in separate cages!) have been living at my dad's place. I moved out several months ago, initially into a place where I couldn't have pets, and then into the apartment where I am now, where I got the runaround from management on whether or not I had to pay pet rent (!) for my guinea pigs, and how many I could have.

Then my dad told me that one of my pigs, the mother, whose name was Kawaii, had died and that "the little brown one" didn't "look good." I drove up there as soon as I could, and it just about broke my heart. The cages clearly hadn't been cleaned in weeks and what had been a little hair loss when I'd last seen them had progressed into full-blown mange mites in both Hen Wen and Fiona, the two surviving sisters. Fiona was an absolute mess - hardly any hair left on her rear 2/3rds and an awful sore on her back, and Hen Wen didn't look a lot better. Both were very skinny.

I hadn't yet heard back from apartment management about whether or not there would be charges, or how many small animals I could have, but I just couldn't leave them there! I cleaned out Bunny and MJ's cage - they both looked healthy - and packed up the girls in a doggie travel cage. This was Sunday night. I've been taking them out to go in their run on the balcony a couple times a day, and cleaning the cage out every night, and cleaning their poor cuts with hydrogen peroxide, and I have a vet appointment for tomorrow.

It just breaks my heart to see them like this - thus all the rambling. I can't believe my dad didn't even close closely enough at them to see that they were dying.

So...the end result of all that is that I feel very guilty! And I need to somehow figure out how to use what space I have REALLY well.

I'm planning to take over a corner of the living room next to the sliding glass door that leads to the balcony. There's a stretch of about 48-49" of wall there, and I'm thinking of overlapping and zip-tying grids to fit the space closely, and going out two grids from the wall, then seeing if I can manage layers. I can't take that much space for the two cages that I'll ultimately need, TWICE, but I could go high there. Like, a 48x26ish space for each pair, with some additional space on a second level. The problem would be engineering it so it was stable, and being able to get to everything easily for petting and cleaning.

Does anyone have any directions to point me on looking into trying to STACK cages? That's really all the space I've got to work with (and my roommates would really prefer more seating there as it is), so I'm going to need a lot of creativity to give my little darlings the space I'd like to. I've been reading through the site and looking and pictures and trying to brainstorm, but I keep coming up against the engineering difficulties of stacking cages. Alas.

But on the bright side - there's a lot of industry around here, so getting coroplast should be easy as pie, and I plan on scurrying over to Costco and picking up some white or chrome cubes, either today or tomorrow.

That was a very long-winded message - sorry! And thanks for all the great pictures and information. It's very encouraging and I love all the ideas! Now if only I wasn't allergic to Timothy hay...

-Ava

[ava.trimble]

Whoops, just realized maybe I should mention that in my avatar, that's my big fat (male!) cat, with Hen Wen and Fiona when they were just a couple days old. The cat has been around guinea pigs since he was a tiny kitten, and seems to consider them to be kittens.

The piglets were sitting on the bed, and they ran over to investigate the purring cat, who reached out his paw to snuggle them! The guinea pigs then fell asleep cuddled up with him, and he curled up around them, purring, until I finally had to go to bed an hour later, and put the pigs back with their mother. Now that some interspecies awesomeness!

-Ava

[rabbitsncavyluv]

Hydrogen peroxide isn't the best choice and can actually be more painful for them. I'd skip using it and just get ivermectin to treat them all for mites. The can kill them if left untreated. Mites progress pretty quickly.

Here Guinea Lynx :: Ivermectin

If you look through the gallery, you will see how other members made stacked cages. Get a lot of zip ties to secure the cage.

[ava.trimble]

We have a vet appointment in two hours - if my dad had caught it sooner I would probably have treated it myself (I used to treat my pig myself when I was 12!), but now they're so sickly that I'd rather a vet checked them out.

I'm going to be getting a LOT of zip ties. Thanks!