Hello everybody, new forum member here. I've been hopping on here on and off for three months or so whenever I had a concern about my herd. I've had experience with guineas (though that was a long time ago now) so I'm not a completely new guinea parent, but I've previously only adopted already bonded groups that worked out their issues, so I've never encountered a behavioral problem like this.
I have a group of three females, all around the same age: Dingo, Midget, and Creeper. They were all store bought (Petco, and I did look to adopt from a rescue but there are none that are really in my area); Dingo came first, and Midget and Creeper were a few weeks later from the same shipment of pets. They should be about five months old. They've had no prior medical or behavioral issues, have ample room and hideaways, and I checked to ensure they were all female. They all got along perfectly fine until about a week ago, when Midget and Creeper became hostile towards one another. I separated Creeper into a travel enclosure and spent the time since then tentatively trying to reintroduce them. The last time I tried, I placed them in the same enclosure, separated by a spare cage panel so they could interact and hopefully eventually be reintroduced. That plan lasted all of five minutes because they were lunging at each other so hard that they knocked the panel loose and actually fought. It lasted all of five seconds before they broke away, and it left Creeper with a scratch on her foreleg and a slightly nipped nose -- there was blood drawn, but only a tiny bit thankfully. As I'm typing this I can actually hear them making their angry huffing sounds at each other through the cage panels, so this is still an ongoing issue.
So. . . what can I do now? I know that it's a possibility that they just won't be able to kept together in the same enclosure again, but I would be grateful if anyone had any insight as to what might have suddenly caused them to become so hostile to one another or suggestions as to what to do to bond them again.
I have a group of three females, all around the same age: Dingo, Midget, and Creeper. They were all store bought (Petco, and I did look to adopt from a rescue but there are none that are really in my area); Dingo came first, and Midget and Creeper were a few weeks later from the same shipment of pets. They should be about five months old. They've had no prior medical or behavioral issues, have ample room and hideaways, and I checked to ensure they were all female. They all got along perfectly fine until about a week ago, when Midget and Creeper became hostile towards one another. I separated Creeper into a travel enclosure and spent the time since then tentatively trying to reintroduce them. The last time I tried, I placed them in the same enclosure, separated by a spare cage panel so they could interact and hopefully eventually be reintroduced. That plan lasted all of five minutes because they were lunging at each other so hard that they knocked the panel loose and actually fought. It lasted all of five seconds before they broke away, and it left Creeper with a scratch on her foreleg and a slightly nipped nose -- there was blood drawn, but only a tiny bit thankfully. As I'm typing this I can actually hear them making their angry huffing sounds at each other through the cage panels, so this is still an ongoing issue.
So. . . what can I do now? I know that it's a possibility that they just won't be able to kept together in the same enclosure again, but I would be grateful if anyone had any insight as to what might have suddenly caused them to become so hostile to one another or suggestions as to what to do to bond them again.
