SpinningNickel
Junior Guinea Pig
Worrywort mama would like some reassurance, please. I've mentioned this before but inadvertently in completely the wrong place, so I thought I'd try again.
I have two boars. Machu, my pet-shop boar, is about 9-10 months old. Yoshi, my rescue baby, is about 3 months old.
I'll be honest: I'm not as diligent about weighing them as I should be. Weekly? Yeah, mostly. Sometimes I miss a week. Sometimes I miss two. It happens. But it's fairly regular, all things considered.
This time, I've missed about 2.5 weeks. I thought I had last week, I hadn't, bleh, I'm a terrible mother. Anyway, Yoshi has put on a whopping 117g. Machu has LOST 22g. (Initially memory betrayed me; I thought he'd lost about 50g and panicked big-style, but consulting his weight chart on my computer has calmed me down a bit.) I'm not TOO worried about this right now (for my standards, anyway); I'm just going to put him on unlimited nuggets and weigh him daily for awhile.
Machu is the dominant one, mostly due to age, and although he doesn't retaliate in any real fashion when Yoshi rips a piece of carrot more or less out of his mouth, he doesn't allow himself to get scammed out of his fair share, either. He's also always loved to chow down on the dry nuggets (ie, the fattening food). They have unlimited hay, plus additional forage at least once a week (dandelion, dried herbage, corn husk, etc.), regular grass, and twice-daily veggies (30g each morning and the same at night).
I get that Yoshi is a baby and will be growing a lot faster than Machu, but... they now weigh almost the same! Yoshi is 772g this moring, and Machu is 810! (I brought Yoshi home at 6wks old and he was 502g then.) Is it normal for a boar of Machu's age to weigh so little? Can he really be THAT runty? Their weights for the last few months are below, and you can see he really has plateaued. He isn't losing significantly, he's totally fine in himself, and I don't think he's ill or needs a vet -- I'm just wondering if I should be trying to get a few grams on him. Even losing that mere 22g, I could feel it the second I picked him up this morning (after a few days of little to no handling by me personally thanks to a crappy work schedule) which prompted me to head straight for the scales. That makes me think maybe he's really on the border of being an acceptable weight for his age. Would slipping him some oats be totally amiss and over-reactionary?
I have two boars. Machu, my pet-shop boar, is about 9-10 months old. Yoshi, my rescue baby, is about 3 months old.
I'll be honest: I'm not as diligent about weighing them as I should be. Weekly? Yeah, mostly. Sometimes I miss a week. Sometimes I miss two. It happens. But it's fairly regular, all things considered.
This time, I've missed about 2.5 weeks. I thought I had last week, I hadn't, bleh, I'm a terrible mother. Anyway, Yoshi has put on a whopping 117g. Machu has LOST 22g. (Initially memory betrayed me; I thought he'd lost about 50g and panicked big-style, but consulting his weight chart on my computer has calmed me down a bit.) I'm not TOO worried about this right now (for my standards, anyway); I'm just going to put him on unlimited nuggets and weigh him daily for awhile.
Machu is the dominant one, mostly due to age, and although he doesn't retaliate in any real fashion when Yoshi rips a piece of carrot more or less out of his mouth, he doesn't allow himself to get scammed out of his fair share, either. He's also always loved to chow down on the dry nuggets (ie, the fattening food). They have unlimited hay, plus additional forage at least once a week (dandelion, dried herbage, corn husk, etc.), regular grass, and twice-daily veggies (30g each morning and the same at night).
I get that Yoshi is a baby and will be growing a lot faster than Machu, but... they now weigh almost the same! Yoshi is 772g this moring, and Machu is 810! (I brought Yoshi home at 6wks old and he was 502g then.) Is it normal for a boar of Machu's age to weigh so little? Can he really be THAT runty? Their weights for the last few months are below, and you can see he really has plateaued. He isn't losing significantly, he's totally fine in himself, and I don't think he's ill or needs a vet -- I'm just wondering if I should be trying to get a few grams on him. Even losing that mere 22g, I could feel it the second I picked him up this morning (after a few days of little to no handling by me personally thanks to a crappy work schedule) which prompted me to head straight for the scales. That makes me think maybe he's really on the border of being an acceptable weight for his age. Would slipping him some oats be totally amiss and over-reactionary?
