Pig Notes

Rethinking The Vitamin C Supplement

For some time now, Cindy has been using a different Vitamin C supplement for guinea pigs needing an extra nutritional boost due to illness or prior neglect and malnourishment. The supplement comes not from the pet store, but from the baby supply aisle.

Natra-Bio Children's Vitamin C comes in a sweet, citrus-flavored syrup. Unlike vitamin supplements available in pet (supply) stores, this is not a multivitamin -- it's all Vitamin C. (Guinea pigs don't need multivitamin supplements.) Cindy says the rescue pigs she's given it to have all lapped it up. Look for it online for the best price (and make sure you check the expiration date when it arrives). Any local drugstore, vitamin shop, or natural grocery should be able to special-order it for you if their distributor carries Natra-Bio.

Another option is actively recommended and prescribed by South Wilton Vet. Maxi Baby-C Liquid from Country Life is a vegetarian/kosher supplement that comes in an all-natural cherry flavor. Guinea pigs that don't like oranges, or orange-flavored treats, will likely respond more favorably to this supplement. Look for it online to get the best price (and check the expiration date when it arrives). Like the Natra-Bio supplement, if your local store doesn't already have it on their shelves, they should be able to order it for you.

In both cases, you'll have to have your own syringes in order to administer these supplements to your guinea pig(s); supplements are administered orally. For an adult guinea pig (average weight: 2.5 pounds), give 1.0ml daily. You can administer 0.5ml twice daily if your guinea pig doesn't have the patience to sit for 1.0ml in one dose.

(NOTE: Just as your own doctor needs to be aware of what vitamin supplements you're taking regularly, your veterinarian needs to know what your guinea pig is being given.)

If you find other options on the market, be mindful of the ingredients. Watch for milk, lactose, or any ingredients derived from milk (like sodium caseinate); guinea pigs are herbivores (no milk, no meat). And, again, always check expiration dates.

More Options For Dinner In A Hurry

Before Christmas, we wrote about how Earthbound Farms' Spring Mix can be a huge help when you need to feed your guinea pigs their morning or evening veggie servings in a hurry.

The large containers of EB Spring Mix can feed four guinea pigs for 2-3 days, depending on how big the servings are. If you're looking for smaller packages for a pair of pigs, you might consider some of the following options from Fresh Express.

• Premium Romaine or Organic Hearts of Romaine
• Sweet Baby Greens (contains some combination of the following baby lettuces: salanova, baby red and green butter lettuce, baby green and red romaine, tango, baby green and red oak, lolla rosa, baby green and red leaf)
• Organic Italian (romaine lettuce and radicchio)
• Organic Mixed Baby Greens (contains some combination of the following: baby red romaine, royal red oak, lolla rossa, new red fire, baby red leaf, tango, little gem, baby green romaine, green oak, baby green leaf, mizuna, tat soi, red mustard, green mustard, red chard, green chard, arugula, baby spinach, radicchio & frisee)
• 5-Lettuce Mix (romaine lettuce, butter lettuce, green leaf, red leaf & raddichio)
• Fancy Field Greens (romaine lettuce, curly endive, frisée, radicchio & shredded carrots)
• Riviera (butter lettuce & radicchio)
• Sweet Butter (green butter lettuce & red butter lettuce)

We should note that Earthbound Farms does have its own variations of many of the salad blends listed above. We have noticed lately, however, that while many grocery stores around Connecticut sell the plastic, recloseable containers of EB's Spring Mix, the preponderance of the smaller bagged salad blends in produce aisles seem to be from Fresh Express.

Be sure to check out these companies' Web sites, as they offer delicious recipes and lists of add-ins for their salad blends that are sure to appeal to the humans in your household!

Dinner In A Hurry

Want to give your guinea pigs a varied diet of fresh greens but don't always have time to wash and dry produce before the family heads out in the morning?

Check out Earthbound Farms' Organic Spring Mix at your local grocery store. It comes pre-washed (triple washed, actually) in a one-pound plastic container. The mixture includes: several types of baby lettuce, red and green chard, mizuna, arugula, mache, frisee, and radicchio. (Product packaging states that ingredients in each container may vary.)

Prices vary slightly from store to store, but the average is about $6.50. For some budgets, the price may be higher than can be spent on a regular basis but including just one container to your pigs' monthly diet can add quite a bit of excitement..and dare I say, decadence...to your pigs' routine. It's a great item to buy for that week that you know you're going to be particularly busy -- or to give your piggies their own special holiday feast.

If you can hang around for a few minutes after you give your pigs a handful of this mix, you'll find the sounds of happy crunching and munching to be the highlight of your day!

Something Else For Guinea Pigs To Sink Their Teeth Into

Most guinea pig care guides (and vets) discourage owners from feeding their pigs commercial treats and treat mixes, especially on a daily basis. With the huge range of fruits, vegetables, grasses, and hays that guinea pigs can eat, it's easy to mix up their diet and keep them from getting bored with any one thing. When you can give them a sweet and nutritious treat like a strawberry, it's hard to give colored treats that look like Fruit Loops serious consideration.

But our friends at Sweet Meadow Farm have come up with a different treat -- called Sweet Meadow Mix. This is a hearty-looking, high-fiber, good-smelling mix that includes oats, corn, cane molasses, wheat middlings, dehulled soybean meal, dried grains, oat mill feed -- and no colored mystery bits. And it's proving to be irresistible to the guinea pigs who've had it.

You still need to be judicious about feeding treats to your piggies. But this is one mix that you can feel good about giving them!

Something For Piggies To Sink Their Teeth Into

Our friend Al at Sweet Meadow Farm in Massachusetts recently started selling a timothy pellet food for guinea pigs. Already known by small animal owners in New England for his organic timothy hay, Al's new pellets smell good (even to us humans), are nutritionally balanced, and easy on the wallet (especially for owners with multiple critters). He also offers food pellet products for rabbits.

Al's products can be purchased online through his Web site. We're also seeing a lot of them at independent pet supply stores (like Pet Super-bowl in Stratford, to name one).

Guinea Pigs & Their Carrots (Part II)

Much as guinea pigs love their carrots, they do sometimes get a bit finicky about them. This finickiness has less to do with boredom than it does with the quality of the carrots coming from a particular bag. With keen senses of smell and taste, they seem to detect something amiss with produce a couple of days before we can.

Regular Carrots. With carrots, you might have a batch that's tasting a bit old, perhaps dry, definitely not sweet. Or, perhaps, they've lost quite a bit of their crispness, still crisp in the thickest part but a bit soft and "bendy" in the thinnest part. In either case, guinea pigs will turn up their noses and wait for you to give them something better.

Rather than let these not-bad-but-not-great carrots go to waste, you can cook them for humans in ways that will let them pick up other flavors: 

• throw them in soup
• oven-roast them with other vegetables in a mixture of barbecue sauce and honey
• cook them on the stove in orange juice and brown sugar
• cook them on the stove in butter and dill

Baby Carrots. With baby carrots, which typically come prewashed and peeled, over time they seem to acquire a coating that feels a bit slimy...the product of being sealed in bags without being dried well enough after washing. If caught soon enough, these carrots can be restored to their normal tastiness by washing them under warm water and being given a quick once-over with a vegetable brush.

All Carrots. In the case of regular and baby carrots, sometimes guinea pigs bite off and leave pieces of the outside of the carrot but finish the innermost part. When this happens:

1. Give the outside of the carrots in the current bag a good scrubbing and/or peeling
2. Run what's left across a grater (the same side you'd use for cheese) or through the chop cycle in your food processor
3. Mix the shredded or chopped carrot into your guinea pig's daily "salad" (hiding the carrot will appeal to their foraging instincts)

If you have a food dehydrator, I know of a family that slices carrots and makes "carrot chips" (unseasoned!) for their guinea pigs and rabbits!

Guinea Pigs & Their Carrots (Part I)

I'd be surprised if there's a guinea pig out there who doesn't like carrots. Personally, I have yet to find one.

Guinea pigs love carrots like chocaholics love chocolate. A guinea pig will dive into a fresh carrot with the same gusto that a child dives into an Easter basket. It's a high point of their day. And when they finish what you give them, they'll stare up at you sweetly, as if telepathically trying to say to you, "May I have another, please?" It's hard to deny them and, thus, easy to help them over-indulge.

But carrots, as healthy as they are, require some moderation in a guinea pig's diet. Just as too much Vitamin A in a human's diet can be detrimental over time, so too can it be for guinea pigs. But there's an even more immediate concern. That sweet taste that carrots are known for means sugar (albeit natural) -- and too much sugar in a guinea pig's diet makes them as susceptible to diabetes as humans.

It's not uncommon for new guinea pig owners to overfeed carrots on a daily basis, offering a handful (five or more) of baby carrots or dropping a huge "regular" carrot into the cage. Even though our feeding recommendations (and those at Guinea Lynx) include a note about carrots, we often have to call special attention to "portion sizes" for carrots.

• 1 to 2 baby carrots OR
• equivalent-sized portion sliced off from a carefully cleaned "regular" carrot

Depending on how exacting you want to be, you can determine "equivalent-sized portions" by weighing, measuring, or eyeballing. Some owners who already buy large bags of carrots for their households, and aren't willing to buy a second bag just to have baby carrots, make a habit of cleaning a couple of carrots at a time and cutting them into pieces about the same size as baby carrots. If you have a budget you need to follow, this can be much more economical than buying bags of baby carrots.

If you've been overfeeding carrots to your guinea pigs, you'll need to cut back. Guinea pigs get comfortable in their routines, and most owners swear that their pigs can count carrots. Depending on how good your brood is at begging and mooching, coordinate with other family members about when carrots will be fed during the day and how much. You also might consider gradually cutting back over the course of a couple of days, putting something else into the daily salad (perhaps a piece of sweet bell pepper or a small chunk of cucumber), and making sure there's plenty of fresh hay in the cage.

What to do with the extra carrots left in your fridge? They make a great snack for us dipped into a little ranch dressing or hummus!

Can Guinea Pigs Eat Celery?

Not a week goes by that we don't get asked about feeding celery to guinea pigs. Or that we run across someone who is feeding too much celery to their guinea pigs on a daily basis.

Admittedly, celery has some attractive qualities, two being that it's crunchy and filling. Guinea pigs do love celery leaves, and some do love the satisfying crunch of the celery stalks. But there's a few things to keep in mind about celery:

• It has a high water content.
• It causes bloating and gas in humans (when eaten frequently or in large quantities), so you can imagine what it does to a guinea pig's belly.
• All those strings that we peel off celery stalks so they don't get caught in our teeth or in our throats also wreak havoc on a guinea pig's teeth, throat, and intestinal tract.

It's best to think of celery as an "accent" to your guinea pigs' daily salad, served in small quantities.

• Mix celery leaves in with a serving of lettuce and other vegetables.
• Thinly slice celery stalks, which makes it easy to find and remove strings. 
• Consider giving it on alternate days to help keep some variety in your pigs' diet.

Using these tips can help you ensure that you don't overfeed celery, or that your guinea pigs don't become quickly bored with it. Additionally, by mixing it in with other veggies, you can make meal time a little more interesting for your guinea pigs as they forage through breakfast (or dinner).

Don't forget to set aside a stalk or two for yourself!

Recommended Daily Veggie Allowance for Guinea Pigs

How do you incorporate fresh vegetables and fruit into your guinea pigs' daily diet? How big is a "serving"? How many servings a day should you feed?

At the rescue, we get asked these questions a lot. So today we offer a couple of plays on the "daily menu".

While at the rescue, each guinea pig is fed one cup of vegetables per day, split between two feedings. This mixture can include:

• romaine or red leaf lettuce
• red and green bell pepper
• flat or curly parsley
• small amounts of kale, swiss chard, dandelion leaves, leafy green carrot tops, or leafy celery tops
• small amounts of finely chopped celery, parsnips, or cucumber
• two baby carrots (per day)
• a piece of fruit (strawberries, apple, orange, melon)

The folks over at Guinea Lynx also have a sample list that you might want to print out and refer to.

Stay tuned over the coming days as we talk more about your guinea pigs' diet. Please chime in about the fresh foods that your pigs go wild for!

Looking For A Good Bag Of Hay

What is with the hay we're finding in stores lately? Some of it is mainly stem and stalk. Some of the bags are more bits and pieces and dust than they are hay. A few too many bags on the shelves contain yellow hay (BAD!). Cindy has even received a few boxes of hay that, when she dug into the middle of them, were damp and moldy.

Hay is supposed to be green, fragrant, dry, not dusty. For our small critters, it also should be soft. So why is it getting so hard to find hay products that meet all that criteria?

Absolutely fed up with bags of hay from well-known growers that contained almost all stem and stalk -- too much of which had sharp edges that could scratch and gouge guinea pigs' mouths -- I went hunting for something better. Hay, as I've come to learn, gets softer with each cut. First-cut hay will have a lot of stem and stalk and maybe not as much leaf as we'd like to find in a bag. With 2nd cut hay, you have substantially more leaf than stem. By 3rd cut, you have the softest, leafiest hay you can find.

Of course, 2nd and 3rd cut hay are going to cost you more. But given the cost of vet bills for antibiotics, exams, and (possibly) surgery that will come if your small critter's mouth gets gouged and then infected, I'm willing to pay a little extra for what I've come to regard as "safe" hay.

Some brands specifically market bags of 2nd and 3rd cut hay in their product lines. I highly recommend American Pet Diner's 2nd Cut Timothy Gold Hay. It's fragrant, soft, and not a bit dusty. You're pretty much limited to ordering it online, but it's well worth the cost and shipping fee.

Other brands just sell bags of hay, and it's pretty much anyone's guess what you're going to find when you open the bag. As the year goes on, the bags do seem to be less stemmy and stalky than what you find earlier in the year, but the hay still isn't always as soft as we might like to find. Some brands, like Sweet Meadow Farm, do distribute hay that is consistently very soft and leafy...but it does take trial and error to find these brands, or a tip from an existing user. (Sweet Meadow Farm is a local grower that produces organic timothy hay; you can find their products in smaller, independently owned pet stores or pet supply stores, or online.)

So how about you? What hay have you had good luck with, and where do you get it?