Munchkin ate the rubber rim around the bottom of her water bowl. She keeps eating until there is nothing left. Silk , on the other hand, eats only when she is hungry. Munchkin never stops eating. I took her to the vet, when she had eaten the rubber and was told that she was pass it. Silk has got to the point of lying across the pellets bowl to stop Munchkin from eating all the pellets! The vet told me that animals can have the same types of disorders as humans and that she has pica.
My guinea pig has pica
- Thread starter Jenni F
- Start date
Viennese Furbabies
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Some guinea pigs develop a taste for things like rubber or plastic bags. Some even eat fleece items.
Please try to remove everything from the cage that should not be eaten. You can use hideys made out of natural materials (eg wood, willow ...) or cardboard boxes with holes cut into them.
Do you feed lot's of hay?
Maybe this can distract Munchkin's unusual appetite a bit.
Please try to remove everything from the cage that should not be eaten. You can use hideys made out of natural materials (eg wood, willow ...) or cardboard boxes with holes cut into them.
Do you feed lot's of hay?
Maybe this can distract Munchkin's unusual appetite a bit.
Hi
Quite a number of piggies have a hankering for rubber, plastic and some types of glue (in wallpaper for instance). It's not at all uncommon. The only thing you can do is to keep it out of their reach as much as possible.
Please either remove the rubber ring from the bowls or sprinkle feed your veg and pellets around the cage in order to stimulate natural foraging behaviour.
Sprinkle feeding counts as an enrichment activity but since any veg, forage, 1 daily tablespoon of pellets per piggy and any extra treats all together only replace the supplementary role that wild forage would have had in their original diet, it also encourages piggies to eat as much hay/fresh grass as possible during the day and night - grass fibre should make over three quarters of their daily food intake because the digestive system is totally laid out for it, and so is the dental growth rate; it is the very abrasive silica in grass/hay fibre that actually grinds down the all important back teeth. A mainly hay based diet can add up to 1-2 years to a healthy average life span and take it from the lower end to the upper.
One of my pigs was obsessed with chewing on baseboards and drywall. We would chase her away from it but she would always come back. She's been sadly gone for years but we still have all these piggie-grawed walls to remember her by!
I would try to reduce her access to these items just because you don't want to worry about her ingesting them all the time, but some pigs just really, REALLY like eating non-food items!
I would try to reduce her access to these items just because you don't want to worry about her ingesting them all the time, but some pigs just really, REALLY like eating non-food items!