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A few guinea pig questions2007-11-24 21:57:14

1. I am thinking of making the swap from pet store products to oxbow products. I have been looking through their site and am very pleased with the way they provide nutritional information etc.

At the moment I am using a plain pellet, something similar to the cuisine and hay. Like I said I want to swap to Oxbows products, I was thinking their 40lb Alfalfa Hay bag to start with. Is the bigger bag cheaper? My guinea pigs are 4 months and 4 months and 2 weeks, so I thought afalfa hay, is this right?

What's the difference between Cavy Cuisine and Cavy Performance? Do my girls need this? And is the biggest bag cheaper?

What about their pellets? I can not find it on their site, do they sell pellets?

2. I was also thinking (if I get the ok) of moving my guinea pigs inside. Should this be done gradually? We have reverse cycle airconditioning, it is often on at night, will this harm my girls?

Answers:

Great questions! I can't really answer all of them, but I'll tell you what I've learned from personal experience. First of all, all my boys are older, so I use the timothy hay-based products.

I was fortunate enough to find a local pet store that actually carries Oxbow's line of products (woo hoo!). I ended up starting off with their pellets first, as the price on the hay was a bit steep for the size of the bag (at this store, anyway). I believe that Cavy Cuisine is timothy hay based and Cavy Performance is alfalfa based, thus CCuisine is for older pigs and CPerformance is for young and nursing pigs. I found the best way to get my boys to eat the new pellets was to mix them in with the old pellets. It was this way for a few days until I got lazy and just put all Oxbow in there...it worked fine. They like the pellets very much. And, I might add, the Oxbow pellets had more of a fresh, green hew to them as opposed to the brown hew of the pet store pellets I had been using (Kaytee's Timothy Complete). Yes, the do sell their pellets on their site (I'll link to it below).