Chat So many gpigs for adoption rn...

[4boipigs]

Anyone else seeing a LOT of guinea pigs on petfinder? Currently I'm looking to adopt a new hamster, but there are NONE on Petfinder or similar sites. Instead, day after day, guinea pigs are being added one after another. There's 57 guinea pigs near me!!(broken link removed). Anyone else experiencing this?

 

[SSLee]

I used Petfinder to look at the 10 miles from my area and there are only a few postings up. As the searchable area gets wider and into more rural areas, the availability jumps up tremendously. I also look on Craigslist frequently and the piggies posted in my area generally get rehomed pretty quickly. But same situation with the more rural areas further away, a lot more piggy rehoming postings. I am sure some of them are back yard breeders as I see similar postings periodically. I need to stop looking at the piggy postings as I saw two adorable piggies with the magic words of easy to handle, friendly, and gentle. I absolutely cannot take on any more. Currently I have three and two is my ideal, plus I spend time taking care of my elderly parent.

There is an absolutely cute hamster listed on the San Francisco Animal Care & Control site that has been awaiting adoption for 5 months. Good thing he is with a foster family and not at the actual shelter. At some point, I need to adopt a hamster to make up for how poorly we treated a hamster decades ago when we were clueless on hamster care. We fed the hamster almost exclusively sunflower seeds thinking that was the right food for him. We took the hamster to the vet to have his teeth filed several times but the vet's office never asked us what we fed him.

 

[ItsaZoo]

A lot has changed in small animal care over the last 2 decades. I think we all look back and wish we knew then what we know now. I had Habitrail cages with all the tubes and extensions, but I don’t remember buying hay. I must have fed a commercial pellet or something, but I’m sure I also fed stuff around the house.

I recently found a care guide for guinea pigs at the library book store. It was published in the 1990s and recommended feeding them dog bisquits to keep their teeth from over growing.

 

[teambenji543]

At my local animal shelter they have over 70 Guinea pigs with 100 rabbits and other small animals. The shelter foster coordinator told me that it was because over the pandemic people bought guinea pigs for their kids, but then once things started opening back up they found that they didn’t have enough time for the guinea pigs. Ive also noticed that a lot of the animals in the shelter were found abandoned on the streets. I’ve been fostering this rabbit for 6 months, named Snickerdoodle, who was found hopping around outside and some good Samaritan brought her in. The animal shelter is at capacity, and every day they’re asking for help so I’m thinking of fostering some Guinea pigs.

I have to agree, I feel really bad for the hamsters I had as a kid… they were kept in tiny bin cages and looking back, I wish I had treated them better. My mom told me that she had Guinea pigs when she was a kid and they fed them only pellets. She told me that that’s what everybody did back then. I always try my best to give any animal the best care possible but I can’t help but feel sorry for the animals I had as a kid.

 

[4boipigs]

I actually never had a hamster as a child. I vaguely remember a sibling having one or something like it in a typical small wire cage. I only got into them because I like adopting senior animals, and there was a 2 yr hamster at an animal shelter. He was so friendly and tame that I wanted more after he died.

 

[Kelsie]

I only had one hamster in my life. I remember I called him "Happy" and when I purchased him I also bought the whole Habitrail system with all of the tubes and sleeping quarters. I think he had a pretty good life but I didn't spend a lot of time holding him. Even now I feel badly about that.

Fast forward years later and I adopted a rat that had been abandoned in an empty apartment. That began my love of rats. I've had so many over the years that I can't even remember all of their names. I keep a journal that contains all of their information such as when and where I adopted or purchased them along their names and all the info about their personalities. I'm pretty proud of the life that I've given each of them. They have a very large cage and a playground that my husband built for them that's like a miniature Disneyland. I've only ever had female rats. They are so much fun and they really get along so well in a group. The only sad thing is the short life span that they have.

It was heartbreaking to get so attached to them and then lose them in 2-3 years, although I did have one who lived to be over 5 years of age. When the chance to adopt two guinea pigs came up I knew that I wanted to expand my little rodent family and I brought Rusti and Randi home. I fell completely in love with guinea pigs and now I can't imagine my life without having at least two piggies. With my ratties and guinea pigs I feel that my life is exactly as I want it to be.

 

[4boipigs]

I finally found my hamster yesterday! In addition to looking at sites like Petfinder, I would search FB as well with a combo of words since shelters make posts about their animals. I found a post with a gpig (of course) and a hamster about 20 minutes after it was posted, for a shelter about 40 minutes away. I rushed up there and adopted him! Poor guy was surrendered w/ the guinea pig. I'll post what I wrote about him on a hamster forum...

I asked about the ham and the shelter people were THRILLED beyond words that I wanted to adopt. It seems like they don't get small animals often, so they were desperate to get him out of there. There was also a gpig surrendered w/ him. It was the most rushed adoption ever...they didn't ask me any questions, didn't have me fill out anything. Just handed them my driver's license and they brought him out. It was literally like...oh you want the hamster? Great! Just pay the fee, and he comes with all this stuff. Take him and leave!
He came with a Tiny Tales cage (pic of him in it before I moved him to new cage), a green Petsmart wheel (don't recall the exact size but big), a ball, and some Walmart brand food. His owners were living in a hotel with him, the surrendered guinea pig, and 4 cats (don't know what happened to the cats). They would put him in the ball and let the 4 cats chase him. Supposedly he enjoyed it. Idk how or if he ran on the wheel considering it wasn't even close to fitting in the Tiny Tales cage, and it didn't have a wheel. Idk what to do with all this extra stuff, will probably just be a back-up wheel and a transport cage. The bottle leaks and I told them to keep the hamster ball. The food can be fed to the wild birds or in the trash.

The instant I got home and started to fill his new cage with bedding (cage had been all cleaned out but not fully ready), he was climbing the bars and chewing on them for minutes on end. It was horrible!! All he did was hang on the bars and chew chew chew and the sound was terrible. He is a year old, so he's lived like that for a year. His cage smelled like pee, I'm pretty sure his bottle was leaking everywhere, and he tried to burrow away but couldn't. There wasn't even an inch of bedding. His adoption paper even listed 'climbing the bars like a monkey' as one of his hobbies...on the plus side, he is relatively tame!