Choking On Food

Pohtaytur

Pohtaytur

Junior Guinea Pig
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So, Harold has been a bit of a piggy (pun intended) when it comes to eating, so he sometimes makes a coughing sound when eating veggies. It didn't initially happen when we first adopted him with Henry. We've managed to reduce that a bit when feeding him by giving smaller pieces, but he started choking on the pellets today, with kind of that pre-vomit sound. It stopped after a bit, and he seems ok now. He actually started loafing on his side after he stopped. He slowed down with his chewing when we fed him his veggies after, so I think he learned a bit to not eat so fast, but is there a way to prevent this better in the future? He just gets too excited. This is the first time he ever choked liked this so I might just be overreacting, but I got so scared that it was going to be an emergency.
 
Do you feed them using bowls?

There’s two ways I can think of to prevent them from eating veg and pellets too fast

- hand feed each item one at a time. Will work well with veg, but might get a bit tedious with pellets!
- scatter feed. Spread both veg and pellets widely around the cage, hide in hay etc, so they have time to chew the item they have while moving on to search for the next item
 
Piggies&buns said:
Do you feed them using bowls?

There’s two ways I can think of to prevent them from eating veg and pellets too fast

- hand feed each item one at a time. Will work well with veg, but might get a bit tedious with pellets!
- scatter feed. Spread both veg and pellets widely around the cage, hide in hay etc, so they have time to chew the item they have while moving on to search for the next item
Click to expand...
Yeah, I use bowls since my mom doesn't want the pellets all over the place. I wanted to try scatter feeding but she started complaining about how the cage looked messy because of it. I'll probably try and hand feed him in the future since we already hand feed veggies. Thank you for the tips!
 
Scatter feeding the pellets shouldn’t make a mess. Do they have their hay in one area? You could scatter it in their pile of hay.
 
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