Dwight is having trouble breathing

[Hannah Shinn]

Ive had my pig Dwight for around 6 months now and he has seemed healthy up until a few weeks ago. He started having trouble breathing and sometimes, not all the time, sounds like he has something clogging his lungs. He has no discharge from his eyes or nose and he is not coughing or sneezing a lot so I am hesitant to think it is a URI. It almost sounds like he has their hiccups but i know he does not. If anyone has had a similar experience please let me know! not many vets around me see guineapigs so i’m trying to do my own research before finding a vet that will see him during quarentine since I have never brought him before. Thank you!

 

[Piggies&buns]

He needs a hands on check by a vet. Any issues with breathing need to be checked out quickly. Doing your own research is fine but an experience for one person/piggy may be different to what is actually going on with yours.

Have you been weighing your guinea pigs routinely each week? How has his weight been? Once you suspect an illness in a piggy then you switch from routine weekly weighing to daily weighing (at the same time each day) as this enables you ro to step in with syringe feeding if there is an issue with the weight.

 

[Hannah Shinn]

I have not been weighing him routinely but I can see he has lost a bit of weight, not a shocking amount. His energy has not changed and he still is hungry when i bring in veggies ad give him his vitamin C cookie but he is not eating his regular pellets as much.

 

[Piggies&buns]

I have not been weighing him routinely but I can see he has lost a bit of weight, not a shocking amount. His energy has not changed and he still is hungry when i bring in veggies ad give him his vitamin C cookie but he is not eating his regular pellets as much.

you need to weigh him weekly but daily when you have health concerns, as it is the only way way to know he is eating enough hay. Pellets and veggies are merely snacks and jointly only make up 20% of the daily food intake, hay makes up 80% of the daily food intake but you can’t judge hay intake by eye hence the importance of weight checks. Vitamin c cookies don’t count at all as they don’t even need to be fed (they get all their Vit c needs from hay, a slice of bell pepper or other high Vit c veg and the recommended limited amount of one tablespoon per pig per day of pellets). If he has lost weight (anything more than 50g in weight loss and you go into alert mode, so the fact you haven’t been weighing him but you can see he has lost weight means he has possibly lost more than 50g) he isn’t eating enough hay and you must step in and syringe feed him to stabilise his weight and get him to a vet.

Not Eating, Weight Loss And The Importance Of Syringe Feeding Fibre
Weight - Monitoring and Management

Does he live with another guinea pig?