Introductions Help! Fighting!

[lemonham]

I adopted a little girl guinea pig (8 months) to be a companion for my brother's guinea pig Tonzi (3 months) and we did the introductions last night. However Honey keeps chattering her teeth at Tonzi and nips at her ear. Poor Tonzi is terrified and is just miserable. We have them in a large petstore cage (because we are currently at Grandma's house for Christmas). We even tried the buddy bath but to no avail.
Should we separate them until we get them back home to the C&C cage or do you have any other suggestions? I hate to see Tonzi so scared.

 

[lemonham]

I need advice!

 

[Paula]

You need to be patient. First of all, based on what I can find from your other posts, you just got this new pig three days ago - so I'm assuming there was no quarantine - I hope she's healthy. Secondly, are you positive they are both females?

Now, teeth chattering is a normal part of intros - sometimes it goes on for a ridiculously long amount of time. Chasing, mounting, nipping is all normal. They have to establish dominance and that's how they do it. Having them in a small pet store cage is going to play a part in whether they can get along - it's too small for two pigs and ideally they'd need to be in their larger cage when you try to get them together.

For now, as long as there's no bloodshed, I'd leave them together and get them into their bigger cage as soon as you're home.

 

[lemonham]

Thanks! I will just let them be. Hopefully it will get better.
I took Honey to the vet for a checkup on Thursday because I knew that we wouldn't have time for a quarantine. She's completely healthy and the vet did a very thorough job checking her for everything I could think of. I had to put her in the car, along with my two piggies and my hamster so I wanted to make very sure that she was healthy. I didn't want anybody getting sick.
Thanks again for your help.

 

[sillylittle]

Just my two cents, and please don't take this the wrong way, but why did you get her so soon? If you weren't going to have time for quarantine, you probably should have waited on getting Honey until they could be properly introduced, with a suitable quarantine...

 

[Paula]

It's great that you took her to a vet and got a checkup, but that doesn't negate the need for proper quarantine. Vets aren't able to catch illnesses if they are in the first stages - sometimes time is the only thing that will identify illness. In all likelihood, it's going to be fine, but realistically, you might still have problems that only a proper quarantine could help you identify.

But, what's done is done, so best of luck to you during this process.