Hello GP friends,
My girlfriend got a GP a while back whose name is Gus. He's a very social GP and squeaks a lot. She got him from the shelter.
Then she had read that GPs like to have friends, and she saw a male guinea pig at the pet store and got him. His name is max.
Anyway, after a few days of having them in separate cages in the same room, we introduced them in neutral territory and they "had at" one another if you know what I mean. We didn't put them in the same cage though, and waited a couple more days, and then introduced them again outside in the grass and they did the GP rumble again, and weren't fighting too bad, so at that point we put them both in a new, bigger cage with 2 of everything, ie. food dish, pigloo, etc. Gus was about 6-7 months old at the time, and max was probably about 3-4 months old.
We had them together for a couple of weeks and they never got along. There was constant teeth chattering, head-raising games, and they either stayed in their igloos and deliberately ignored one another, or were fighting. One time they got in a "ball of fur" fight and we had to stop the fight. We figured it would be best to separate them, so my girlfriend has Gus now, and I have max. Max is very very shy, still shivers a lot of the time when you pet him, runs and hides in his pigloo whenever I enter the room, and if I take him out of his cage he just sits wherever I put him without moving. I'm spending time with him every day to try and get him more ok with the world. I think he may have been traumatized a bit by Gus, and maybe that's why he is so timid and scared, but I really don't know, and I also don't know his "pet-store history" but he was very young when we got him, probably a month or so.
My question is: Do you think we should try again to get them living happily together? It would be great if they could be friends, because then I'm sure they both would be happier, and we wouldn't need to maintain them in 2 separate cages. Or do you think that given their previous experience with one another they would just be happier alone and seperated?
Here are some pictures so you can see what they look like:
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Thanks,
Todd
My girlfriend got a GP a while back whose name is Gus. He's a very social GP and squeaks a lot. She got him from the shelter.
Then she had read that GPs like to have friends, and she saw a male guinea pig at the pet store and got him. His name is max.
Anyway, after a few days of having them in separate cages in the same room, we introduced them in neutral territory and they "had at" one another if you know what I mean. We didn't put them in the same cage though, and waited a couple more days, and then introduced them again outside in the grass and they did the GP rumble again, and weren't fighting too bad, so at that point we put them both in a new, bigger cage with 2 of everything, ie. food dish, pigloo, etc. Gus was about 6-7 months old at the time, and max was probably about 3-4 months old.
We had them together for a couple of weeks and they never got along. There was constant teeth chattering, head-raising games, and they either stayed in their igloos and deliberately ignored one another, or were fighting. One time they got in a "ball of fur" fight and we had to stop the fight. We figured it would be best to separate them, so my girlfriend has Gus now, and I have max. Max is very very shy, still shivers a lot of the time when you pet him, runs and hides in his pigloo whenever I enter the room, and if I take him out of his cage he just sits wherever I put him without moving. I'm spending time with him every day to try and get him more ok with the world. I think he may have been traumatized a bit by Gus, and maybe that's why he is so timid and scared, but I really don't know, and I also don't know his "pet-store history" but he was very young when we got him, probably a month or so.
My question is: Do you think we should try again to get them living happily together? It would be great if they could be friends, because then I'm sure they both would be happier, and we wouldn't need to maintain them in 2 separate cages. Or do you think that given their previous experience with one another they would just be happier alone and seperated?
Here are some pictures so you can see what they look like:
(broken link removed)
(broken link removed)
(broken link removed)
(broken link removed)
(broken link removed)
Thanks,
Todd