my guinea pigs completely eat the coroplast. What can i do to help this?
It seems completely random.....some will show little interest in coroplast, and others become obsessed with it. I generally have had cavies who don't have much interest until now. Rascal chews on the coroplast to get my attention.....even though it may be negative attention such as obsessively chewing it when trying to get my attention. If he is hungry, then he will chew to get my attention and perhaps feed him a snack. If I swat him and sternly say "no", it only deters him for a minute or two and then he is right back at it.
Of course, if I give him the requested snack, he will eat and go take a nap for a while and stop begging. Their cage sits alongside my desk and I can't get away from the noise. He comes over to the side of the cage next to me and waits for me to notice him.Today I decided to ignore him and the gnawing just increased in intensity. I then put a towel over the side of the cage so that he couldn't see me and after a while he seemed to give up.
I have never found anything that will deter the chewing. I've wiped the favorite areas with some pretty awful tasting potions, none of which would be poisonous to him.......nothing worked. The only deterrent that I know is to put binder edging along all exposed edges. I didn't do this when rebuilding the cage and it can be a little difficult to do after the coro "box" is created and all exposed edges covered. The binder edging is a harder plastic and they quickly give up when they encounter it. I put it all over the ramp edges, but none over the exposed edges of the coro "box" which is 6" high. I plan to redo that part of the cage when I refurbish it. I wouldn't recommend using the binder spines which are only 12" long and a much softer plastic.
I obtained my longer, heavier spines from a
Michael's Craft Store. They are marketed as
poster hangars and are 24" in length. They are a bit difficult to put on if a structure already has the ends joined. The easiest is to thread it along all exposed edges and THEN join those edges together.