Guinea Pig Connection

Mother Nature Kicks Us While We're Down

It's been five weeks of shoveling and shivering and shoveling and shoveling some more. The end of 2010 saw fewer holiday donations coming into the rescue, and 2011 saw us swimming upstream before it even started.

And now this.

On Thursday night, the roof on Cindy's and William's quonsett hut collapsed, resulting in the probable loss of everything that was stored in there -- personal items and a large inventory of rescue supplies. The latter includes (but is not limited to) extra C&C cages, carriers, hay, and $300 in cage bedding that Cindy bought two weeks ago.

(Rest assured, no animals or humans were hurt in the collapse.)

Some things may be salvagable, but Cindy and William aren't yet certain how safe it is to go in and try to retrieve anything. The sides and the front door are still standing, but the whole center collapsed. With the threat of another storm next week that's big enough to dump another foot of snow on Connecticut, they'll have to move quickly if they have a chance of saving anything. Much as they're trying to be optimistic, the reality of the scene in their backyard tells them that only pessimism is in order.

The need to replace $300 worth of bedding is a huge burden. If all the rescue supplies have to be replaced, the cost will be financially devastating to the rescue.

Our regular readers know that things have to be bad -- really bad -- before we put fundraising appeals on the blog. But dire circumstances force a direct appeal.

At this point, we're asking for monetary donations (only) so that Cindy can restock as soon as new storage space becomes available. You can donate by

• PayPal (the donation button appears on the right side of every page on the blog, our main Web site, and our Petfinder site)
• check (mail to The Critter Connection, P.O. Box 371, Durham, CT 06422)

Donations of all sizes will be gratefully accepted, and acknowledged with a mailed receipt (to help with tax-deduction documentation). Some folks feel awkward about making donations of even $5 or $10, thinking them too small to be helpful but forgetting that everything collectively adds up to big help.

We thank you in advance for all your help!

Housekeeping Note: Our Blog's Comment Policy

After five years of writing this blog, I had to break down and do something I never thought I'd have to do: publicly publish a comment policy.

The majority of folks who leave comments here are cool people who love their guinea pigs, love talking about guinea pigs, and respect us as animal rescuers and authors of care information. But just as it takes only a few apples to ruin a bushel, it takes only a few folks to drag down the energy of a blog (and its owner). Over the last year, we've been persistently bugged by a gaggle of blatant self-promoters who became so obnoxious and intrusive on the blog that I threw comments into moderation until I'm sure they've gone off to bug someone else.

What made these commenters so irksome is that their comments were spam in disguise, and were posted only to drive traffic to sites that were

• stealing and repackaging content from sites like Guinea Lynx
• selling information products that contained guinea pig "care" content that was so erroneous or irresponsible that no reputable rescue would want the remotest hint of association with them
• phishing sites masquerading as e-commerce sites
• clearly designed for the sole purpose of creating Google Adwords revenue
• possibly legimitate, but negated because the posting frequency of their owners' comments was so excessively frequent that we knew they were more interested in their own site than in intelligent dialogue on ours
  

There's been a host of other instances of bad, disrespectful, childish, and flaming behavior that I won't go into (otherwise, I'll have to de-ick myself all over again). All of this tomfoolery is time consuming to deal with, and takes away from more valuable efforts. These comments also drag down other readers' experiences with our blog -- and that I can't abide by.

Most of our readers have nothing to worry about...but the "miscreants" have been put on notice. I hope our loyal readers will forgive the "intrusion" of this kind of housekeeping post as a necessary and well-intended measure designed to look out for their interests as much as ours.

You can read our guidelines on the Comment Policy page. Thanks, in advance, for continuing to respect them.

New Year's Intentions

It's been a crazy couple of months (and three snowstorms in three weeks have not helped). Over the last two or three days, I've been catching up on my reading, which is where I discovered a Paw Nation post titled "What Are Your New Year's Pet Resolutions?"

I'm not big into resolutions, because they're pretty much destined to be broken even before you finish defining them. I have found the idea of New Year's intentions to be more successful, for intangible reasons that extend beyond simple semantics.

I take good care of my pigs, buying them the best bedding, a wide variety of fresh fruits and vegetables (Belgian endive and Boston lettuce even make an appearance every few weeks), take them for wellness exams, and make their daily needs the skeletal structure upon which the rest of my life's schedule is built. The "This House Is Ruled By Guinea Pigs" sign in my kitchen is no exaggeration.

So there's no intentions to be set for those obvious things, but I do still have one, and that's to hold them even more than I do. I wrote last September about some recent losses of furbabies, and how during my grieving process I agonize over whether I gave them as good as they gave me. And I always wonder if I held each of my guinea pigs enough. Snuggling through a movie. Curling up with a book. Scooping them up at random times just to give them a quick hug. Sitting with them and focusing on just them...no TV, no books...just them and me. Fully present togetherness. Lots of love. It's a good intention, I think.

What about you? Anything you want to strive for with your pets this year?