Eating Less Pellets?

[BaaaaL]

Hey everyone!

I have a strange question, but I could not find any related topics, so here we go:

About a week ago, I noticed that our two piggies seemingly started eating less pellets. We are feeding them Versele-Laga Cavia Complete (the best grainless guinea pig pellets available in Hungary), and usually they have devoured their share within ~1.5 hours of feeding. However, now they take about 3-4 hours to completely eat about the same amount. The only thing that has changed is that we are feeding them a different brand of hay (Real Nature) which they seem to vastly prefer to the previous brands, and that we have recently opened a new bag of food and the pellets seem to be a tad longer than usual.

Otherwise, they are behaving normally, eating loads of hay, drinking their normal amount, etc. To be safe, I have weighed them 3 times within this week, and the results were:

11.26 11.29 12.02
800g 810g 805g
580g 600g 595g

Do you guys think this is something we need to be concerned about, or is is just natural variation resulting from them getting bored of the food/needing less pellets in this particular period of growth? (they are about 5 months old)

Thanks a lot!

 

[Lady Kelly]

Not a concern at all. Pellets account for very little of a piggies diet and hay is the vast majority. It sounds like they are eating less pellets because they are eating more hay which is a good thing. Weights are stable too. I think you just have very contented piggies

 

[BaaaaL]

Thanks, that is reassuring! The reason I was concerned is because I am generally extremely (read: to an actually pathological level) paranoid when it comes to the health of animals, and it was strange that their eating habits changed this suddenly. When we first got them, they ate their pellets at roughly this pace, then suddenly there came a long period when they would just devour them in hours, and we got used to that as being normal. Also, they did not immediately start neglecting pellets when we introduced the new hay (Real Nature, a tad under 10$ for a kilogram, for comparison, some brands of hay go for 2 bucks here), apparently they needed some time to fill up with the stuff, and realize it's good for them At the same time, I obviously didn't want to risk a trip to the vet at this weather (under zero here), especially since we don't own a car.