the owner and manager of the pet shop i work at approved me to keep a breeding pair in the store to sell the babies. we were just given a no longer wanted male, approximately 10 months old. i am not sure how we will get a female. she cant be over 7 months old if she hasnt been bred before. i have a good idea of how to breed them without killing her, but does anyone, most likely robyn, have any suggestions? i wont list all that i know about them since i have been reading up on them a lot lately, just want to know of any tips or precautions that i may have missed.

Yes, the sow must be young, 4 to 7 months is good. The parents should be kept separate except when you want her to become pregnant during which time you can keep them together for about a month to be sure of pregnancy. If present when she gives birth, he may harm the babies and will try to breed with her right then which is too hard on her body. She should be given a rest of a few months between litters ideally but I'm sure the store will just want to pop them out. Pregnancy is about 68 days. Babies should leave the mother at a month old (or at least the males separated out) but not be sold until 6-8 weeks old ideally.

ideally and pet shop profitable can be very different, but i hope i can bend the two for a happy medium. why the wait between weaning and sale? i figure they will be handled more at a home than at the shop, making them better pets. so once they are weaned why not give them to a settled, caring, proper setup and family? i think a private home will be less stressing, less cost-cutting, and more loving than a pet shop. what method do you prefer for providing vitamin C?

You are right that perhaps in this case, the babies would be better off in a home (assuming that they know what they're doing which sometimes they don't) than a pet shop. The wait is to be sure the baby piggies are healthy and stronger and less fragile. During that extra time, sows can stay with their daughters and continue to teach them the way of the pig.

Most good and fresh (important) guinea pig pellets have enough Vitamin C. To make sure mine get enough, I also feed foods high in Vitamin C like oranges and broccoli, and I give them Vitamin C pills made by Oxbow (see http://www.oxbowhay.com for their site; that's also where I get pellets but I mail order them from http://www.petfooddirect.com to save shipping).

well, i hope to be the main person selling the g-pigs, so i can teach new owners about the most important things about them. i hope that the other people at work will be willing to learn it too, but probably not. the owner said he has a breeding pair on the way in a few weeks, so im not sure what we will do with the male we just got. the one we got was given to us because the kids didnt take care of it. he is in a little 12x24 wire cage. surprisingly there was a few sites that listed this size
(2 square feet) as a minimal cage size. g-pigs are almost half a square foot anyways (at least the males), so this cage seems way too small to me. i brought him a quarter of an orange saturday, he ate all the flesh and some of the skin. yesterday i did the same thing and he barely nibbled the flesh. i guess he was so lacking in vitC sat that he gorged, but sunday he was okay and therefore didnt need to eat it. i also gave him 2 baby carrots each day for his teeth. we clipped his nails saturday too. he is a nice, relaxed tricolor with short cow-licked looking hair, i cant remember the technical names for all those traits. if th enew breeder male isnt what i want to breed, i may just use this one and not use the breeder male that we get.

It sounds like he's an Abyssinian like my piggy Kylie who died recently of a heart attack (see http://www.fishpondinfo.com/pig.htm and http://www.fishpondinfo.com/pig2.htm for my pig pages).

I agree that most cages for guinea pigs are way too small. The same can be said for a lot of animals. The biggest boar I've ever seen must have been a foot long and 5 pounds.

Try some kale; it's my pigs favorite.

i found a site and he is a "tortoise-shell and white" (tricolor as i call him). and yes hes an abyssinian, forgot what was what. we are getting a breeding pair in a few weeks, along with 2 babies to sell. i am going to pick which male i like better, and we will breed him with the female. i have wanted one for a while now, but im not sure if i want to take the plunge.

I love tri-colors. He sounds like a beautiful male. Unless the new one is extra special, I would breed him first. You can always breed both boars, alternating litters if you have the space for them. Guinea pigs are very sweet.

the thing with breeding both (which i did think about) is that means more cages, cleaning, work, lower profit, that kind of stuff that makes it inapplicable to a pet shop. if anything one boar and two sows would be good. while one sow gets rest from the last pregnancy, the other is in the middle of hers. this also spaces the births consistantly to allow the old litter to hopefully be sold before the new litter is ready to be shown. it sounds bad, but too many g-pigs could (shall i dare say it) be sold as feeders as we do have a large base of snake people always wanting large rats. im not crazy about it, but they are a rodent and their natural niche is food for other animals. moving on to more pleasant things...yes, he is a very nice boar. he was exactly what i was wanting, tricolor abyssinian. the only thing that would make him better is more white, he only has a streak on his nose. i would rather it look like he was white with 1/3 black patches and 1/3 brown patches. so if the new boar is that pattern, i will use him.

Could you keep one boar yourself as your personal pet? He sounds really gorgeous.

The way to try to deter people buying the baby guinea pigs to feed to snakes is to make them more expensive or keep them longer (8 weeks like I mentioned) so they're bigger. Most guinea pigs cost $20 to $30.

A few years ago, the experts decided that guinea pigs are not rodents. You can read about that on the internet.

can i get a link to how they arent rodents? i read one site where it mentioned it was now under debate, but no details were given, that may have been in a magazine or something. i meant if we have too many g-pigs they could go as food, its not what id prefer, but if we have way too many we may need to. poor rodents and rodent type animals. i understand it, i fed rats to my savanna monitors, and gorf the frog, but i can have them as pets too. its their place in the ecosystem, so to me its not a horrible thing, just unpleasant.

someone gave us 2 males today. both are smooth coated so i dont like either as a breeder more than the one we have. they are together, have been since they were bought, so they are used to eachother. big cage too, thats nice to see, especially after that tiny one the last one came in. they are $14.99 ea. $9.99 ea. if you buy a cage. we need to sell them before the babies and breeders get here in a few weeks, thats why they are so cheap. they are about 1-1.5 yrs old.

It was published in Nature so you'd have to go to a library for the original scientific article but here are articles about the article if you will:

http://groups.msn.com/GuineaPigsUnlimited/...398425410879745

http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_...v53/ai_18773108

It's strange that in my search for those links, up came many more links saying that they are rodents. As a scientist, I'll stick with the DNA. I guess most people are behind the times.

we got 3 young females, instead of a pair. i have picked one and now we just have to grow her to age/size. she was born in september, i cant remember the exact date off hand. all of them love their baby carrots i bring them everyday (except today and the original male kept looking at me like, "come on!, give 'em up, i know you've got 'em.") so i have to definitely bring some next time i work.