Gary is sneezing and breathing loudly!

[LilBigPig]

The smaller of my two piggies tends to sneeze and wheeze a lot. He sneezes quite regularly but is constantly breathing heavily and loudly. I worry about him and we have taken him to the vets and he said that it may be a mild chest infection and gave us some antibiotics to cure it to give him for a week. They never worked though and I am now wondering whether to take him back there. He seems happy otherwise although he is a bit underweight and my other pig is a bit overweight (I think he is robing all the food!) Any advice?/

 

[lindsay7]

Welcome to the forum.

My Joe had a chest infection that would not go away we tried Baytril and Septrin and they both did not work. Debbie recomended Zithromax which i told my vet about who normally did not use this but ordered some in for me. After the Zithromax his chest cleared up and <touch wood> Joe has been free from a bad chest for nine months now.

Def take him back to the vet and suggest you try this.

Hope it works for Gary I'm sure it will. Keep us up to date on how Gary gets on. x)

 

[Rachael]

Mine do that atleast once every 2 days. It's normally things like dust off wood shavings if you use them. If he's happily popcorning and not going off food etc then I think he's fine. I don't know anything about this medication I'm not the right person to ask about that:p
But otherwise I'd say he's fine if he's acting normal.

 

[Charl]

They have a chest infection every two days? That's no good.

 

[Laura-CCC4]

Not a chest infection, Pip. I believe what Rachael meant was that her piggies exhibit similar symptoms (sneezing and wheezing) when the cage is cleaned out/new bedding put in. In other words, the pigs suffer allergies.

Hayfever and sensitivities to bedding and dust is quite common in guinea pigs. The difficulty is in identifying a respiratory infection (URI) from an allergy, because obviously you cannot risk leaving the pig if there is a chance the pig has a respiratory infection. One key sign that it is an allergy is that medication does not make any difference to the pigs symptoms. Another sign is that with URIs, the symptoms tend to get worse rapidly, while hayfever/allergy symptoms can exist for a long time while sometimes being more severe, but then easing off at other times.

A vet check is important to rule out an infection, but it is also important to consider:

- what bedding you use;
- the quality of the hay;
- how often the cage is cleaned out, and how often the hay is topped up;
- the pollen count;
- the weather/temperature/humidity.

Often just monitoring when the symptoms occur can lead you to the cause of the sneezing!