RoyalDuke
Junior Guinea Pig
I took a book out from my univeristy library and it has a section on Guinea Pigs throughout history, I copied some out for future use in my own assignments, but I thought some of you might find it interesting!
Warning though, it does talk about how Guineas' were treated in 7000BCE, well before their were standards for keeping animals. The book is called A Guinea Pig's History of Biology by Jim Endersby.
Several thousand years ago, perhaps as early as 7000BCE, the people of the andes started to keep cuys as livestock. They were probably treated much as they are today; most rural families in the Andes have a dozen cuys living in their house – they usually live in hutches in the kitchen and feed on scraps. Once they are fat enough, they are killed and cooked. Among the Andean people they still have other uses, as gifts or as a form of pocket money for children. They play a part in traditional healing ceremonies, during which, live cuys are sometimes still rubbed on the affected parts of the people who are ill, and then sacrificed. Cuys are found at the heart of all kinds of Andean rituals, from birthdays to weddings; their ritual significance survived the transition to Christianity – on All Souls' Day, the dead are offered a portion of cuy meat.
As with any domesticated animal, the Incas began a haphazard kind of selective breeding of the cuy, almost without realizing it, as soon as they took an interest in the species. Cuys that were too fast to catch, too aggressive, or too skinny to eat simply did not find a home in Andean homes. As with other domesticated species, features of the animal that would have been a distinct drawback on the wild became a plus in the domesticated breed; natural selection is unlikely to favour an animal that resembles a placid, slow-moving, substantial meal, but artificial selection favours precisely those traits. As the cuy changed its shaped and behaviour to suit its new habitat, humans must have noticed what was happening and began to breed them deliberately, probably about 3000 years ago. By the time the Spanish invaded South America in the sixteenth century, the cuy was fully domesticated and was used for both food and in Inca religious ceremonies. Mummified cuys have been found in Inca tombs, along with terracotta statues representing them. Modern guinea pigs have been steadily adapted to human needs ever since, so much so that they are now classed as a separate species, Cavia Porcellus, whose precise relationship with the wild species of the Andes is no longer clear.
The cuy made its debut in print in 1547, when Gonzalo Fernandez de Oviedo y Valdes published his Historia general y natural de las indias (General and Natural History of the Indies'), the earliest illustrated natural history printed in Spain.
[gap]
He saw his first cuy in Santo Domingo, but since they are not indigeous to any part of central america, these would have been domesticated ones the Spanish brought over there. Oviedo renamed them the “chanchito de la India”, or little pig of the indies. His decision to dub the animals “pigs” may have been prompted by their squeaks and squeals, but the name seems more likely to refer to the fact the European pigs were often kept much the same way: allowed to wander the homestead, eating scraps until they were fat enough to eat.
[gap]
Sometime in the seventeeth century, English speakers started calling these animals guinea pigs. It remains unclear exactly when or why, but in 1664 the English natural philospher Henry Power was confident enough that they were familiar enough to be used to provide a comparison for the distinctly familiar cheese mites hhe had observed under his microscope, which he described as looking “like so many Ginny-Pigs, muching and chewing the cud.” (2) The origins of “guinea” remain a mystery. All kinds of implausible suggestions have been made, including the idea that these pets sold for a guinea (21 shillings, which would be £100 in today's money – rather a lot for a small pet). It has also been suggested that the ships bringing the animals from South America called in at Guinea in West Africa on their way to Europe, but there is no evidence for this, not for the more plausible confusion of Guinea with the South American country of Guyana, It is more likely that the British used “Guinea” in a very loose sense to mean any far-off, exotic country – somewhere so distant and foreign that one knew (or perhaps cared) exactly where it was.
A couple of other notes - Queen Elizibeth I had one, and it was carried around by a servant on a silk pillow.
Charles Cumberland had a Male guinea pig called Bobby who was allowed to run free in the kitchen and was "much petted." "Those who are intimate with the animal will...find many gratifying marks of intelligence and affection."
Warning though, it does talk about how Guineas' were treated in 7000BCE, well before their were standards for keeping animals. The book is called A Guinea Pig's History of Biology by Jim Endersby.
Several thousand years ago, perhaps as early as 7000BCE, the people of the andes started to keep cuys as livestock. They were probably treated much as they are today; most rural families in the Andes have a dozen cuys living in their house – they usually live in hutches in the kitchen and feed on scraps. Once they are fat enough, they are killed and cooked. Among the Andean people they still have other uses, as gifts or as a form of pocket money for children. They play a part in traditional healing ceremonies, during which, live cuys are sometimes still rubbed on the affected parts of the people who are ill, and then sacrificed. Cuys are found at the heart of all kinds of Andean rituals, from birthdays to weddings; their ritual significance survived the transition to Christianity – on All Souls' Day, the dead are offered a portion of cuy meat.
As with any domesticated animal, the Incas began a haphazard kind of selective breeding of the cuy, almost without realizing it, as soon as they took an interest in the species. Cuys that were too fast to catch, too aggressive, or too skinny to eat simply did not find a home in Andean homes. As with other domesticated species, features of the animal that would have been a distinct drawback on the wild became a plus in the domesticated breed; natural selection is unlikely to favour an animal that resembles a placid, slow-moving, substantial meal, but artificial selection favours precisely those traits. As the cuy changed its shaped and behaviour to suit its new habitat, humans must have noticed what was happening and began to breed them deliberately, probably about 3000 years ago. By the time the Spanish invaded South America in the sixteenth century, the cuy was fully domesticated and was used for both food and in Inca religious ceremonies. Mummified cuys have been found in Inca tombs, along with terracotta statues representing them. Modern guinea pigs have been steadily adapted to human needs ever since, so much so that they are now classed as a separate species, Cavia Porcellus, whose precise relationship with the wild species of the Andes is no longer clear.
The cuy made its debut in print in 1547, when Gonzalo Fernandez de Oviedo y Valdes published his Historia general y natural de las indias (General and Natural History of the Indies'), the earliest illustrated natural history printed in Spain.
[gap]
He saw his first cuy in Santo Domingo, but since they are not indigeous to any part of central america, these would have been domesticated ones the Spanish brought over there. Oviedo renamed them the “chanchito de la India”, or little pig of the indies. His decision to dub the animals “pigs” may have been prompted by their squeaks and squeals, but the name seems more likely to refer to the fact the European pigs were often kept much the same way: allowed to wander the homestead, eating scraps until they were fat enough to eat.
[gap]
Sometime in the seventeeth century, English speakers started calling these animals guinea pigs. It remains unclear exactly when or why, but in 1664 the English natural philospher Henry Power was confident enough that they were familiar enough to be used to provide a comparison for the distinctly familiar cheese mites hhe had observed under his microscope, which he described as looking “like so many Ginny-Pigs, muching and chewing the cud.” (2) The origins of “guinea” remain a mystery. All kinds of implausible suggestions have been made, including the idea that these pets sold for a guinea (21 shillings, which would be £100 in today's money – rather a lot for a small pet). It has also been suggested that the ships bringing the animals from South America called in at Guinea in West Africa on their way to Europe, but there is no evidence for this, not for the more plausible confusion of Guinea with the South American country of Guyana, It is more likely that the British used “Guinea” in a very loose sense to mean any far-off, exotic country – somewhere so distant and foreign that one knew (or perhaps cared) exactly where it was.
A couple of other notes - Queen Elizibeth I had one, and it was carried around by a servant on a silk pillow.
Charles Cumberland had a Male guinea pig called Bobby who was allowed to run free in the kitchen and was "much petted." "Those who are intimate with the animal will...find many gratifying marks of intelligence and affection."
