I guess my question to all of this is, how do you stop the cycle while still believing that each guinea pig life is important. The pigs at the pet store are still living and they still need to be loved. I got my Marshmallow from a PetCo before I ever found these forums so I didn't know too much. I knew he should be with another pig but it was a hassle to convince my husband to let me get the one and I also knew that he would be in a classroom with children adoring him so I wasn't to stressed. Everyone told me that having 2 is better but that having one isn't bad. I must have been lucky because I have NO issues with him, health/social/behavioral, none.
I personally plan on getting a second pig soon. I just bought a bigger cage so that I can (1) Have a cage to put the new pig in during quarantine and (2) So that they can live with space once they are introduced but I like I said, I got my Marsh from a pet store. I checked out a pet store for the second one too.
How can we show them all love if we judge where they come from. It is in no way their fault they are bred and given to pet stores. I see the point about the horrendous conditions but how do we FIX it.
My question is how do we disregard them because of choices they have no say in the matter of?
PS I hope that Midwestern cage I bought is good enough. It's that one with a divider for the food/play area.
It's a fair question, and one that we get asked
a lot. I usually explain it using the basic principal of slow change. Think about when segregation was in place, PoC didn't just decide "Hey we should be treated the same as Caucasians" and then boom, instant change, right? They had to work
so hard and
so long to get the world to change. It's the same with breeding/pet stores.
The other way of putting it, is supply and demand. If there's a demand for a product, it gets ordered in huge batches by the suppliers. By purchasing from a pet store, you're creating a demand for their "product", so they order a nice big supply of guinea pigs that get shipped off to them in no better conditions than tins of soup would to a supermarket. So, if people stop buying from them, eventually, they have to stop ordering. It's not going to happen over night, but eventually, there'll be so little demand for
buying them, they'll have to stop supplying, because there'll be no money in it any more.
By no means does anyone here believe a pet store pig is any less deserving of a good home, but you have to see the big picture. That pig in the pet store's mum might have died giving birth to her. She's been bred back to back since she was old enough to reproduce and it will eventually kill her, and all of the other breeder pigs that they have at the mill. They're kept in foul conditions with a terrible diet and no medical support. Even ones that are bred in "nice" conditions are still having their lives risked so that people can have the convenience of a pet store. Regardless of the conditions the sow is in while she's a breeder pig, there's a 1 in 5 chance she'll die because people like convenience.
And, to pre-emptively answer another question that's usually a follow up to all this, no, the world will not "run out" of guinea pigs if breeders and pet stores are shut down. You only need to take a look at the amount of threads regarding accidental pregnancies this forum has alone to know that whether it's deliberate or not, pig pups will keep on coming. They're hard to sex at a young age, and people make mistakes. However, in the event guinea pigs did somehow become endangered, it would be a different story. Breeding would be done to keep the species alive, and that would be for their benefit. It would be done by people who know the risks, can assess genes to prevent lethal whites being born, and people who know how to breed in the safest conditions possible.
So long story short, if you buy from a pet store knowing the damage it's doing to guinea pigs world wide, you're telling the stores and the breeders and the mills that it's okay to risk so many sows lives (and other pups, too. Plenty of pups die during birth) for the sake of paying in cash with no form to fill out.