Tigermoth I feel you hit the nail on the head.
Please don't read the post as a personal whinge, I'm putting myself into another's shoes. I am not putting myself in any particular person's shoes I may add, but coming from a perspective of someone who has never been on a gp forum and has a 'popular, perhaps out-dated' view of piggies.
I personally can see people's worries and frustrations. There is a very popular image of the guinea pig as being an easy pet. Of them being cuddly by nature, calm and docile. There's the common perception of them being easy on the bank balance and simple to keep.
When choosing a pet it's only natural to draw on past experience (perhaps as a child they knew someone with an 'easy' guinea pig, or had one themselves. It's natural to believe that a pet shop will have staff who can offer quality advice. Some people do look on the internet and look up the basic care-sheet type of information available, and these will discuss what they physically need in terms of housing and food etc, the sounds they make, perhaps the breeds and warn people about hair trimming and nail cutting, some offer taming tips, but I have read quite a few of these and many of them fail to mention the very things that are of concern to new owners:
What the pet shops and care sheets often don't tell you:
1) Guinea pigs can be painfully shy, and can take months to learn to trust their humans.
2) Many guinea pigs do not want to sit nicely on the knee, not on yours, not on your child's. Great when they do, but some never do. I can perfectly understand how disappointing it is when you get a family pet and the family pet doesn't appear to want yours or your children's affections.
- Is there something wrong with the guinea pig? Is there something wrong with you? Aren't you keeping it right? How long will this little piggy avoid you? Will they always be like this?
3) Examine the way people have traditionally kept guinea pigs, and the way that is still encouraged by pet shops. You have a small hutch in a garden and you let them out on the grass in a run when it's nice. You put in everything you believe the piggy needs - hay, food, water and a shelter in the run. What do they do? eat and sleep, nibble and hide. You are in the garden, piggy is in sight. You approach, piggy scarpers and doesn't come out again until you've gone. You watch it from your window. You observe. They eat, they sleep.
Same can be said of the smaller store-bought cages. You put them in. They have hay, food, water, a house and little else. They eat, they sleep, they hide away when you approach. In short, they simply don't 'do' a lot, and no-one has told you that it's because you haven't given them much to do. You are not even aware that they would even like to do anything other than sleep, eat and hide. A guinea pig NEEDS enrichment, but so many people don't know this, and assume that they have quite a 'boring' animal. This isn't nice for the guinea pig, and for their people, well they are missing out on the joys of proper piggy-keeping.
Now coupled with the first two points of a shy guinea pig who doesn't yet appear to be responding the way you expected to being handled and you understand how people can be disillusioned about what they had expected and the reality.
4) Other gripes are that they poop. A lot. This either bothers you, or it doesn't, but it's another thing that care sheets and pet shops don't tell you about. They tell you about how to clean the cage, about spot-cleaning and full cleaning, but the amount of poop genuinely takes many people by surprise.
5) And then you get 'the squabbles', those teenage boars who seem to be constantly under each other's feet just baiting trouble from each other. Now you fear that you've got two that don't even like each other so what on Earth do you do about that? Will they ever like each other? And sows can sometimes be like that too.
6) And the time! Who'd have thought that a pair of little animals could take up so much time?
So some people rehome them. Some people try to find out what's going on and if there's something that can be done about their shy/lazy/messy/fighting guinea pigs.
Many things can be remedied:
Give a piggy lots of space and enrichment items and suddenly you see that they indeed do more than just eat and sleep.
Give them time, admittedly, this can be months, and you see them slowly getting braver and relaxed, and you see they have their individual characters. You can form lovely bonds with those who love your lap, and equally lovely bonds with those who don't. Once they trust you, it's so special, and the bind can be very strong, from both sides, which ever way they prefer to interact with you.
The poop, well you can't stop the amount, and you shouldn't try, but there are ways to manage a large cage with having different areas for things, and you often find that after some experimenting with types of bedding/different arrangements, this gets easier. You never know, you may even enjoy this time of day as being a time of being close to them. It's also important for them to know that your hands do not always mean you are trying to catch them. It's actually a good thing that you have to do this often, all helps with taming them.
Those squabbling young piggies often grow out of it to a large extent.
We all have different needs and personalities:
Just as many animals do.
Some of us love all animals and can appreciate those that others may feel are completely unappealing. I like snails. I like spiders. Tardigrades are amongst my favourite animals. We have two pet snakes - we really like them, they don't feel any kind of love for us, they have no wish to interact, they spend much of their time conserving energy by not doing much. That's fine. They are interesting, or they are dull to people, that's OK.
Some people like specific animals, they are dog people, or cat people, and some love one type but not the other; or fish are relaxing, or fish are boring.......etc.
Do you have a need to nurture? How important is it to you if the animal you nurture does not openly show affection back at you?
Do you prefer a pet that does a variety of things? Some animals do, some don't, some need to, some don't.....
Do you prefer predicatability or can you equally appreciate a species that has a variety of personalities?
Is it essential that the pet slots into your current routine pretty much, or are you willing to change how you spend your time?
Are you a touchy-feely person? Or are you happy to observe?
Do you relish the thoughts of interacting, or would you rather just provide the environment and leave the animal to do it's thing? (self sufficient or needy type of pet)
Do you enjoy an animal that you can be creative with, in terms of enrichment, enjoying the joy that another feels when they explore something new?
I think essentially we all have very different desires when it comes to keeping animals, and the issue comes when you choose an animal believing that it will be one set of things, and then you discover that it isn't ticking the boxes that you thought it would. If those boxes are ticked after you've sought advice then great, that's a happy result, but if you cannot take to your animal no matter what you try, then it is as it is, a case of not the right pet for your personality, and conversely you do not have the right frame of mind for your pet.
Does that make for a bad person? Or just a person who made an error of judgement through lack of knowledge? We can all judge a person for not seeking the right advice, and we can all judge for getting a pet for what we feel are the wrong reasons, but sometimes people just make mistakes.
What if a person, after being given advice, never enjoys keeping their guinea pigs?
The important thing from there-on is the animals welfare, and supporting the person to do the right thing, which varies depending on situation. No-one wants the situation where the guinea pigs are unhappy. Where you have people who thought they knew what they were getting in to and were surprised by those things that the care-sheets and the pet shops don't tell you, they can often be supported into creating a happier bond with their piggy, and when this isn't possible, supported into finding a solution that is best for the pigs. When people are willing to do their best to provide and are maintaining a good, large and enriched home for them, then perhaps their guinea pigs are happy with the bond they have with each other, and simply see their human as a neutral provider of physical needs, rather than someone who loves them or not.
.xx
