URGENT Very Sick Guinea Pig

[Godsgrl]

Quote:
Guinea pigs need fresh greens every day. Dark greens like spinach, turnip greens, kale, stuff like that. Carrots work too. I'm sorry for your loss. We have a guinea pig too, Shadow. (((Hugs)))

 

[Ema]

I am deeply sorry for your loss. I have a couple of my own and I just adore them.

guinea pigs do actually suffer from depression after a trauma or if they are lonely. a lot of people don't really know that, but studies have found that they become less active and more quiet and not the same as before after the loss of a partner, sister or baby...so they deemed it as depression. Mine sing every night after they get their yummy vegie treats and they pop after their litter has been cleaned, they coo when they are pet and make funny noises when they swim.

you did your best, so don't beat yourself up!!

 

[WoodlandWoman]

I'm so sorry she didn't make it. That's so hard, especially when you have children.

As long as the pellets are formulated for guinea pigs, a good brand and fresh, the vitamin C content should be okay. I always fed fresh fruits, vegetables and greens, as well as free feeding hay along with the pellets, too. I used to have a list of fruits and vegetables, along with their vitamin C content. I found it to be a really helpful guide, when choosing what and how much I was going to feed for fresh food. I just did a quick search and found this:

http://www.aracnet.com/~seagull/Guineas/VitaminC.shtml

It doesn't list the amount you SHOULD give your guinea pig a day. It lists the amount of that food that it would take to provide approximately 10mg of vitamin C a day. For the low vitamin C foods, you wouldn't want to feed that much. I just thought you might like this link. I didn't know of anything else I could do.

 

[chicknmania]

Thank you. Yeah, it always hurts more when it's your kid's pet, even when the
kids are older. But they know these exotic pets don't last, we've certainly had
enough of them to know that. i quit getting hamsters a long time ago cause
I couldn't stand the grief every time one died..

Thanks for the link.

 

[Akane]

The average lifespan of a properly fed guinea pig (free choice grass hay, 1 cup of veggies a day, and only 1/8-1/4th cup of plain -no colored bits or loose grains-timothy based pellets a day) with a proper cage and a companion is more like 6-8 with a few seeing 10. That's the average they found over a several year poll on the guinealynx.info forum. This is the guinealynx diet page http://www.guinealynx.info/diet.html . It also has fruit and veggie charts to help you pick out healthy ones.

It sounds like toxins and not something contagious to me. Did any of your feed get damp, has clumps, or contains a lot of corn? Is your hay fresh and kept in a container it can breathe if you have humid weather? Not a sealed up plastic bag. Does it smell fresh or musty? What do you use for bedding?

 

[chicknmania]

Well, grass hay was from our field, or or neighbors, so I'd say it was fresh. Alfalfa was the kind
you buy for gp's. I'll look at the corn content, but I don't remember it being excessive, the food
was Hartz Mountain, I think, that we bought last, and it is for GP's. Usually we just feed them
the pellets. They didn't get excessive produce, we learned about that with hamsters.
Yes, it might've gotten damp or contaminated, lately it has been very difficult to keep a clean cage for my two girls with their schedules and a cage containing two gp's, although they cleaned the cage on an average about once a week to every ten days, with spot cleaning in between. Our gp's did not use one part of the cage as a waste area, they seemed to use the whole thing. But I also read that gp's are copraphagic, which makes you wonder why contaminated food would affect them at all. Pine shavings for bedding..I think it's pine... or aspen...not cedar, anyway. I have never found those life span averages to be very accurate; we have always taken good care of our pets, eg hamsters I was fanatical about for a while, but we never had one live that "average life span". We have had a few guinea pigs and have never, that I remember, had one that lived past five years old. Thanks for the link, we still have one apparently very healthy male, seems bright and cheerful, although I wish he had
a companion, I doubt we will get another one, as my children probably won't be at home that much longer, and I have my hands full as it is with the other animals.

 

[chicknmania]

One thing I did notice about Spud recently...her squeak was wrong, I think I mentioned that. My youngest said it had always been that way. I mentioned the problem to the tech at the vets, of course, when I cancelled the appt. She said gp's have many, many things that can go wrong, that it
could've been cancer or just genetics. They are, as I've often said about chickens, hamsters, and mice, unfortunately designed by nature as food animals and in my opinion not intended to last long, unfortunately....

 

[chicknmania]

Another thought, it says in that link that you should not give them water high in minerals..ours is well
water and I'm sure it probably is.

 

[Akane]

the food
was Hartz Mountain

*shudders* That solves that most likely. You don't need to look at the ingredients on Hartz brand stuff. It's all the cheapest crap you could find irregardless of how the label looks. Lots of animals have sudden illnesses, lumps, or death when switched from better food to hartz. My sister's hamsters would always become lumpy and lethargic on hartz and then be bouncing around hyper and normal looking within a week of switching to anything else. Hartz non food products have killed many animals. I would use horse sweet feed or something similar before using hartz brand.​

 

[chicknmania]

Well, that' s interesting. Hartz has been around since I was little, though, and I don't ever
recall them being investigated for anything. Maybe just wasn't paying attention. I really
think though that Lacie died before we bought the Hartz stuff; we just bought it b/c the feed
store was closed. Could've been. But it didn't affect Toffee, the male, at all.