Tom Lawrence
New Born Pup
Hi everyone, first time poster, hoping I can get some advice from people with more experience as to what might actually have happened here.
Our guinea pig Pumpkin is a very lovable pig who purrs a lot and is obsessed with me specifically. She seems to prefer humans to other guineas. She's caged in a lovely big 6x2 C&C cage with three other guineas: her sister Poppy and two unrelated pigs Sweetie and Honey.
They were introduced many months ago and after some initial squabbling have settled down into a good pattern, with Sweetie as the boss pig and Pumpkin as seemingly at the bottom of the pecking order.
Whether because of this or for some other reason, of late the other pigs have been barbering Pumpkin around the neck, pulling out hair. This worried us rather but since she seemed otherwise unbothered by it (in fact, she'd purr when the pigs first nuzzle her neck hair, and only squeak if they pulled some out a bit viciously) and it wasn't hurting her particularly, we left the domestic arrangements as they were, just trying to break them up if we saw barbering going on.
Just this morning, though, I heard a squeal from Pumpkin, and went over to check, and I found this on the back of her neck:
These are my first four guinea pigs (although my partner owned guinea pigs in her teenage years) so I don't have any experience with wounds, but this looks really nasty to me! We're just about to phone our (lovely, cavy-savvy) vet who opens at 8am, but I was hoping to see if anyone here had any similar experiences with wounds on the back of the neck cause by barbering, and what they did about it? We think we'll probably have to separate the pigs, put Pumpkin in with her sister and Sweetie and Honey (who do most of the barbering that we've seen) separately, although that'll be a wrench because our flat is only so big
.
I'm not 100% sure it was barbering of course because I didn't see the incident, but it's in the same place as she was being barbered before so it would be a hell of a coincidence if it was acquired some other way.
Our guinea pig Pumpkin is a very lovable pig who purrs a lot and is obsessed with me specifically. She seems to prefer humans to other guineas. She's caged in a lovely big 6x2 C&C cage with three other guineas: her sister Poppy and two unrelated pigs Sweetie and Honey.
They were introduced many months ago and after some initial squabbling have settled down into a good pattern, with Sweetie as the boss pig and Pumpkin as seemingly at the bottom of the pecking order.
Whether because of this or for some other reason, of late the other pigs have been barbering Pumpkin around the neck, pulling out hair. This worried us rather but since she seemed otherwise unbothered by it (in fact, she'd purr when the pigs first nuzzle her neck hair, and only squeak if they pulled some out a bit viciously) and it wasn't hurting her particularly, we left the domestic arrangements as they were, just trying to break them up if we saw barbering going on.
Just this morning, though, I heard a squeal from Pumpkin, and went over to check, and I found this on the back of her neck:
These are my first four guinea pigs (although my partner owned guinea pigs in her teenage years) so I don't have any experience with wounds, but this looks really nasty to me! We're just about to phone our (lovely, cavy-savvy) vet who opens at 8am, but I was hoping to see if anyone here had any similar experiences with wounds on the back of the neck cause by barbering, and what they did about it? We think we'll probably have to separate the pigs, put Pumpkin in with her sister and Sweetie and Honey (who do most of the barbering that we've seen) separately, although that'll be a wrench because our flat is only so big
.I'm not 100% sure it was barbering of course because I didn't see the incident, but it's in the same place as she was being barbered before so it would be a hell of a coincidence if it was acquired some other way.
