Bottlebrush Hills Guinea pig Rescue! Can it be done?!

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So do the 9 pigs in the rescue include your current 5 or are your pets separate? What's your ultimate plan for the pigs you rescue - are you intending to keep them or re-home them?

What does your start up estimate of $800-900 cover you for?
 
I think you’d have to look at massively increasing the amount you put in the pot for vet fees. Are the rescue savings for your proposed monthly outlay? Does the $10 pw cover bedding as well, or just food? What do you use for your current piggies bedding wise? Would your grandmother or neighbour be able to take care of 14 piggies for more than a week - mucking out etc?

Something that stood out is when you said you ‘don’t want a ton of pigs’, yet you’re wanting to start a rescue? That’s a bit contradictory. I asked how you would go about rehoming the pigs you rescue. And what you would do if you ended up with one that needed long term management of health ‘issues’. Would you rehome them or keep them on?

You’ve also had suggestions on how to save the money, but as suggested you need to look at the amount of the initial outlay again.
 
I forgot to ask.....i doubt you would be able to diagnose every illness a piggie May have. So, much as you were able to nurse one back to full health, not every health problem is that easy. How will you cover that eventuality?
 
The 20 per week covers just food. We can usually make 10 dollars of bedding last months, so that won't cost much. I just realized I made it sound like I thought I knew everything when I said that about fixing Rita, she was just a little bundle of fluff, and bones, but she got better, she probably weighed under 50 grams when we got her at 3 weeks. I havd no idea what got Buttons but it was bad, and I am worried about this summer, the nine pigs would all be rescues and I would rehome them, my 5 would be kein a seperate hutch. I have a vet saving, which would be for all the animals in my care, rescues and my own. The 800, 900 hundred figure came out of all the start up costs including enough food, hay and bedding to last a few months.
Plus 100 left over to spend on their needs in the future. any ideason how I could raise the money??
 
If you have a rescue (or even just keep pigs), you will need access to a vet, it's not negotiable. Legally and ethically, it's part of our duty of care as responsible owners to ensure they see a vet when they need it. Even as a nurse, there's plenty of stuff I can't even begin to manage myself, and a vet is essential to prescribing meds etc.

Siikibam said:
I think you’d have to look at massively increasing the amount you put in the pot for vet fees.
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I agree. I don't think $360 per annum for vet fees is enough even for one pig, based on the vet fees I pay here in Aus and cited above. And as @Siikibam highlighted, you're spending you're entire rescue budget, $20 per week, on food alone - what about everything else? There's the extra stuff I talked about above - electricity, bedding, vitamin supplements, equipment, shampoos, etc. etc. But there's also plenty of other adlib expenses - for example: this week I spent $50 repairing hutches.

I also think it's not only about saving a dollar figure of money to get started, it's also about being able to generate money to sustain things in the long-term.

Like I said, I average $1100 per pig per year, mostly in vet fees. This is an accurate estimate, as I had to work it out for a home loan application (the lady at the bank nearly died, lol). Even if you are able to do it cheaper - for example: divide the $1100 by five, as you estimate you'll spend one-fifth per week what I do on food - your chook profits are barely enough to cover the pigs you already keep as pets. If you go ahead, I think other sustainable sources of income will be important.
 
If it ‘usually’ lasts a month I’d increase that amount then x3.

On that note, what are you doing in the meantime to sort out your current 5 piggies? I think you should put the rescue savings towards getting them bigger living quarters.
 
I'm concerned that there's a really big discrepancy between your budget and the costs @piglette estimates - I get you're in different parts of Aus but you're estimating $20/week for 9 pigs whilst @piglette is running at $100/14 pigs. That makes your cost/pig just over $2 c/w just over $7. It may well be that you're looking at two ends of the spectrum and both models are perfectly fine but a 3 fold + increase in costs would see you in a big financial hole very very fast.

Can you clarify? You said "I have experience with malnourished, injured, sick and dying guinea pigs" which suggests you've cared for a significant number of poorly piggies and would be competent to nurse them, syringe feed, medicate orally, etc, but you then go on to to talk about Buttons and Rita in a way that makes it sound like they're the limit of your experience. I'm a bit confused as to how much experience you actually have?
 
On a different note, please don't feel like we're trying to be massively negative here - speaking for myself, I'm trying to play devil's advocate. Its clear that your heart is in trying to help the guinea pigs in your area that you know have no-where to go if their circumstances are poor and that's a wonderful wonderful thing. Speaking for myself, I just want to make sure that if you do decide to take this forward you do it from the best position possible having gone round all of these questions and worked out the answers and the plans and the what-ifs and the contingencies and the "how would I cope if"s before you start taking pigs in. In many walks of life I'm all for giving it your best shot and if it goes wrong, well, at least you tried - but in this instance things going wrong would leave the guinea pigs you've rescued in a very precarious position.

As just one scenario for you to plan for...

You take in 9 pigs. 3 of the "boys" turn out to be "girls" who are already pregnant. One has 3 pups and the second has 4 with no problems. The third has a terrible time, looses the babies and needs emergency vet care running to >$1000 with ongoing nursing at home. Oh - and you find out that at least 2 of your 9 arrived with ringworm so you now need to treat the lot. Instead of 9 pigs you now have 16 to care for, you've blasted through 3 years or more of your vet allowance and you have more work than you'd planned for caring for a very poorly pig, 7 babies and trying to get a ringworm infection under control. Even if you had time to check potential adoptees you can't re-home any pigs as they're all under treatment for ringworm. What do you do now? Could you cope with the number of pigs re. space, money and time?
 
I part time work from home, so thats all good. I have read all these posts and I am sorry for being less pasific, I am not to good at typing so it takes a while. When I said I had experience, I ment I only delt with all thoses issues once, plus 5 pregnant guinea pigs who didn't turn out to be pregnant. When I talked about chook money, I ment I would use it to save up. Do you have any ideas on how to save up??
 
In your senario, if I end ed d up spending that much on vet care, I would probably want to keep the pig after that. I would end up with a lot of pigs though lol!
 
I’m afraid I can’t offer advice on how to save up enough to start a rescue. Putting money into an account each week would be a start but unless you have a surplus each week then I suspect the issue isn’t really saving but earning more money or fundraising in order to save funds for the rescue. People aren’t likely to donate to a rescue that’s not yet set up, so it will come down to earning more money. Many rescues do this by selling hand made goods or offering holiday boarding. But I would be wary of the latter as unless you have public liability insurance in place and a cast iron contract about vets fees in case the animal becomes unwell you will be at serious financial risk if anything goes wrong.

Most rescues end up with a hard core of piggies who cannot be rehomed for one reason or another. Many long term residents have ongoing health issues that will drain your vet fund. So you will need to ensure that you can always find raise each month to pay the Vet bills. It’s the vet bills that are the killer for most small rescues.

This isn’t a criticism but an observation - by your own account you really haven’t had much experience with injured or sick piggies. When running a Rescue you really need to be able to recognise all signs of illness brewing, be able to cope with whatever emergencies arise, correctly sex adult and baby piggies, quarantine new arrivals, provide 24 hour care to the sick and injured, deal with pregnancies, miscarriages, stillbirths, neonatal deaths and neurological conditions from reckless inbreeding, deal with post op piggies, abscesses, infections, ringworm, mange etc. Until you have all that experience (irrespective of any money or good intention you may have) I would say you would be premature in thinking to start about setting up any sort of rescue.
 
Tangle said:
I'm concerned that there's a really big discrepancy between your budget and the costs @piglette estimates - I get you're in different parts of Aus but you're estimating $20/week for 9 pigs whilst @piglette is running at $100/14 pigs. That makes your cost/pig just over $2 c/w just over $7. It may well be that you're looking at two ends of the spectrum and both models are perfectly fine but a 3 fold + increase in costs would see you in a big financial hole very very fast.
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I should add that my pigs are well cared for but by no means spoiled, not like some of the other little ones I've seen on this forum :wub: They get a fairly standard diet.

I'm also anticipating my feed costs will increase if we're still in drought at the end of summer - there will be no local hay. This happened a few years ago and I had to rely on Oxbow Timothy imported from the States, or Momi hay from Japan, at $25/kg - and we average 7kg/week - yaikes. So another scenario to consider.
 
You both raise very good points, thank you. How would I go about the handmaid items etc??
 
Are you any good at crafts? Some people knit, sew, make stuff that other people find hard to make but you find easy. My Aunt does craft shows and runs workshops that show people how to do felting and other crafty stuff. Can you do anything like that? My neighbour is doing a craft show with her daughter in a few weeks. She is selling hand knitted items (she's been knitting them for about a year and has loads of stuff now) and her daughter is an artist so will be selling paintings.
 
Teazel 2017 said:
In your senario, if I end ed d up spending that much on vet care, I would probably want to keep the pig after that. I would end up with a lot of pigs though lol!
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Me too! But the question was more to ponder how you would weather the storm?

How would you even finance all those vet bills in the first year? How would you house 7 unplanned for extra guinea pigs? What happens if you mis-sex one and have 1 or more MORE litters shortly afterwards? What happens if you become ill in the middle of all this (its great you have support on hand but however much love they may have for you and want to help, everyone will have a limit as to what they can do - the more critical the support would be the more important it is to know where those limits are before you find them under duress).

Re. the craft fair ideas, its a good idea to go to a few as a shopper and see what's being presented and at what price, and what's selling and what's not. My mother tried doing a few when I was growing up but she stopped as she found there was a large disconnect between the price she needed to charge to make any profit from the day, and the amount buyers were prepared to spend. Certainly in the UK there is SO much available that is mass produced and cheap that many people don't see or value the cost of quality (or even cheap!) materials, never mind the time that gets put into making things by hand. Be realistic over what you can make, how much it will cost (materials and time) and what your product will sell for.
 
Also as an add on to the craft fair idea - sorry forgot to add it!:doh: (Well I was up at 5am stewing apples!) be prepared for your hard work not to sell as well as you think it will. Also you need to know the cost of the table too and how popular the particular craft fair you wish to sell at is.
 
I’m just wondering, how it would work space wise. Is the 2.96x 1.52 metre shed for your own pigs, or the rescue pigs? Is the 9 including your own five pigs, so you’d only take in 4 rescue pigs?

I may have misunderstood but here’s my thinking: My hutch for my two piggies measures 1.5 metres x 0.6 metres and is at recommended size. so in a shed of your size, basing on that hutch size you’d get two hutches (stacked) on one side, and two hutches (stacked) on the other side and that would leave just less than 2 metres across the back for storage. I have 1.5 metre space of storage for my own two piggies and that is bursting at the seams, so I just wonder whether that space at the back of a shed would leave enough storage for so many piggies.
So that’s only four hutches that would fit in one shed....that’s four pairs of rescue pigs (8 pigs in total). plus your own five piggies So you’d need two sheds (if I’ve understood, you are looking to move your own pigs into a shed to give them more room to stop the fighting?).
Plus youd need lots of separate outdoor run space, presumably one large run for your five pigs. But would you also need another four outdoor runs for the four pairs of rescue pigs?
What about if single pigs come in, would you only rehome in pairs so potentially looking to bond any single pigs you get yourself - so you’d need another neutral space for bonding.
 
My own pigs will live completely seperate. The nine does not include my girls. They will live in a different shed, the one with the measurements you listed. Anymore fundraising ideas aside from craft??
 
How much do hutches cost in Australia? For a decent one in the UK, over £100 (and a quick conversion online shows me that that is around $184) but you’d need a minimum of 4 new hutches so the difference between the 900 dollars you want to save and the 579 for the shed would be gone just on hutches?

The fundraising we do where I work include cake sales, sponsored events such as walks, family discos, quiz nights, stalls at fetes, seasonal events such as Easter egg hunts, Christmas bazaars. The problem with some of these things is that the overheads (venue costs, licences, advertising costs etc) for them can be quite big and need a lot of people on hand to help at the events.
 
Sorry to be controversial and quite frankly blunt but I don’t think you should do it.
I go with my gut feelings and feel that given the amount of questions you have asked you would most likely end up out of your depth. This is just an honest reply to your main question.
 
For my current 5, any hutch ideas under 100 dollars? I have no idea what to do.
 
Teazel 2017 said:
For my current 5, any hutch ideas under 100 dollars? I have no idea what to do.
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You talked about an old shed. What's the time scale on that? If you're not sure if your herd of 5 will be able to stay intact then something like a C&C where you can split it if you need to would give you a lot more options.
 
Teazel 2017 said:
Yeah, but that's over a year away. What do I do until then?
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I'm sorry, I can't find an answer to that. Hutches large enough for 5 guinea pigs are expensive. If you can't afford a large hutch and you think it likely that some of the issues you are having are from lack of space then the only solution I can see is to split your herd - keep a group of 3 in your existing hutch and get something new (to you) suitable for the other 2, which you stand a chance of doing for under $100.
 
Do you have $100 right now to buy something if you can find it and/or if things get desperate?
How long do you have before the weather gets really hot?

As has been said, if you're going to run a rescue you need to be able to generate revenue. You've said yourself that you need to save up before you can get a rescue off the ground, and various ways to raise money have been discussed. However, to be honest, I think you need to be on a much more secure financial footing before you make serious plans to start a rescue.

Why not use the next couple of months to push yourself and see how much money you can save up? You have 5 gorgeous guinea pigs right now that are depending on you to do your best for them - and right now that means they need better living quarters. So test out some of these fund raising ideas and see what you can do and how quickly you can raise the money to get the right hutch for your herd. In a few months you'll also have a much better feel for how easy (or hard) it is to generate income - if it works out then great, but either way you'll have some real world data of what YOU can achieve to make some decisions from.

Based on what's been said above, I think to be able to cover the everyday running costs, vet bills and have a contingency fund in place as well you'd need to be able to budget close to $100 per pig per month for a rescue. So if you're thinking of taking on 9 pigs that's $900 per month that you need to find. Even if you think that's vastly over inflated and halve it, that's still $450/month. Your hens are bringing you in a maximum of $50/month profit so that leaves you somewhere between $400 and $850 to generate every month. If you can do that by the end of November that'll make a rescue look like a much more sustainable possibility - but more importantly it means you'd have the cash to get your current pigs a fabulous new home before summer hits in anger :). Set yourself a challenge :D
 
For hutches for your current group, have you thought about looking on second-hand/swap sites like Gumtree? You never know what you might find.

My pigs are indoors - I use C&C cages because they're so cheap, easy and I can have any configuration for whichever pigs/groups I have. You can get them online (I get mine from the Guinea Pigs Australia store, but a friend of mine also gets her grids from cheap homewares stores). My outdoor runs are also C&C cages but reinforced with chickenwire to prevent predators. They're cool in summer and light to move. I don't know if they'd be good as a permanent option, though.

You could also think about making a single-level, rectangular outdoor hutch. I've just done a quick Google and there are actually quite a few plans/tutorials online (YouTube is great). I made an extension to a hutch once out of pine timber offcuts +chickenwire - you don't need any special tools or practical skills (I have neither!). You could pick up everything you need from Bunnings and it was so cheap.

Google around, not only for guinea pig hutches but also for rabbit hutches and chook pens for sale online - for example: Premium Chicken Coop A lot of these come flat-packed and have to be assembled, but it might be easier and better quality than building something from scratch. It may also need to be modified for pigs (e.g. the ramp in the picture above is pretty high/steep).

I think the most important things are that it's predator-proof (birds, snakes/lizards, cats/dogs), cool in summer (though they should never be in a hutch in direct sun in the height of our summer - they just don't cope with the heat), plus a place to get out of the stormy/cold weather.
 
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