Pigtatoes

my herd of pigs, who make my life smellier, messier and much much happier

[pigtatoes]

[pigtatoes]

this is what dolores makes of christmas, or more precisely being asked to share christmas presents with her sisters

[pigtatoes]

this is a Good Widdle Feets right here

[pigtatoes]

it's this cute babb's first birthday today! we've had a broccoli brunch, a pamper session with her sisters using gorgeous guineas products, we're having a little cuddle and then I'm changing their fleeces so they can have a play in their cage before more broccoli.

[pigtatoes]

vinny says hi! sorry I've been quiet, me and the piggies have moved house and we now have a super great, enormous shared piggy room and study which we love. we're still in the process of decorating/setting up but I'll have to take some pictures when it's all done.

[pigtatoes]

I'm not even sure what guinea pigs are

[pigtatoes]

momo is so cute it hurts! she likes to give me kisses and she makes the sweetest chirruping noises when I pet her

[pigtatoes]

errrrrrm gussie, that does not look comfortable

[pigtatoes]

I love your blog! I had to put down my 2 year old piggie the other night after 4 hours at emergency care. Now I'm scared my 5 year old is going to be lonely... can you tell me how to go about adopting and rescuing instead of buying from pet stores??

I can only answer for how I did it here in the UK, it will vary from place to place. First off check out guinea pig rescues, you can google or search on facebook to find local ones. They tend to have very high standards and we were turned down by two for being too far away - the ones in the UK at least have very small rehoming areas, but I understand why entirely. 

After that, as there were no more local ones that had sows available for adoption (sows are particularly hard to find in spring/summer), we looked at more general animal shelters. Guinea pigs are harder to find in these as they tend to focus on cats and dogs, with the occasional rabbit. However we were really lucky in this regard because the Blue Cross, a nationwide animal charity, happened to have some female guinea pigs available. In the end we adopted one from a shelter an hour to the west of us and another from a shelter an hour to the east, so they were essentially at opposite sides of the country. 

It’s also worth looking on places like Craigslist/Gumtree etc. to see if there are any owners who are hoping to find new homes for the piggies they can no longer look after - however there are also a lot of breeders who use these sites so you’ve got to be careful. Also bear in mind that pets adopted from situations like this are more likely to be carrying diseases that can be passed on to your own piggies so they really need to be quarantined thoroughly before integration. 

[pigtatoes]

[pigtatoes]

this is doreen! she's six and a half years old (the vet didn't quite believe it because she's in such good health and looks great) and she enjoys naps, bossing around the younger pigs and having possession of the pig house. she doesn't much like being photographed which sucks because she is honestly so cute that I can't stop cuddling her.

[pigtatoes]

so, dolores - despite being our youngest and only having been here for two days, she seems to be determined to be dominant pig - she's super confident with people! she's been really well socialised - she loves to get comfy and flops around in really odd positions haha. she also sleeps really deeply. the two combined can be a bit scary to be honest! - she's surprisingly tiny but you can't tell with all the fur - she's never met a food she didn't like - anyone who challenges her dominance can gtfo as far as she's concerned

[pigtatoes]

there's something about dolores

[pigtatoes]

meet dolores, the first of two piggies we're adopting this week! she's around 6 months old and she was one of a group who were given up for adoption after the breakdown of her owners' relationship. on tuesday we will be collecting another sow and I'll post about her then :D

[pigtatoes]

little bear finds bank holiday weekends exhausting and is glad to be back to her normal routine of near constant naps

[pigtatoes]

I’m sorry I haven’t posted in here for ages. it’s been tough. I lost both Tilly and Pickle. I still have six piggies but my original piggies have all gone now and looking at pictures of them or thinking about them is really really hard. Pickle especially. She was my best friend. I have a ridiculous array of mental illnesses and she grounded me and kept me safe and without her things haven’t been so well. 

I hope I can post about them soon and have memorial posts for Tilly and Pickle but right now it’s not possible. I might post some pictures of my surviving lovelies - and we’re hoping to adopt some more, as we only have two sows in one very big cage right now, but sows are getting hard to find! 

[pigtatoes]

Truffle left us to cross the rainbow bridge yesterday. We think that, when we brought little Clover in to live with the girls, she passed on whatever infection it was she was battling, as all of the girls (apart from her litter mate Marigold) have become ill. We gave Truffle antibiotics but it didn’t seem to work. Matilda and Little Bear have both been ill but seem to be over the worst. Pickle is still quite ill as she has a compromised respiratory system. Marigold is living in isolation at the moment. If Matilda and LB continue to show no symptoms, she will go back into the cage with them and Pickle will be in isolation.

I wanted to post pictures that best express Truffle’s personality. She was always our personality pig. She was feisty, loud, liked biting anything and everything (human noses were her speciality! hence the very unflattering photo of me), bossed her sisters around and was really the dominant sow. She was cheeky and somehow managed to do exactly what you didn’t want her to. When we got our first two piggies, Pickle and Cheddar, we left their cage door open all the time. They never got out and if we got them out, they’d just run and jump back into the cage. We had to stop doing that when Truffle joined the mix because she was an escape artist! She always had to explore everything. For the first few weeks, she was constantly covered in dust because she’d managed to break free and was nosing around our not very piggy friendly apartment.

She also loved getting comfy cosy, especially with her sisters. In her last hours, nothing would calm her except being with her sisters, pressing herself up close to them. If they got bored and walked away, she tried to follow them, even when she didn’t have the strength. Whilst she could be a bit of a bully in the cage (she always evicted whoever was in the pigloo with a sharp nip to the butt, because that was where she wanted to snooze!), when I got her out with her sisters, she loved to snuggle with them.

Ultimately she was a total sweetie and we’re going to miss her and her piercing wheeks so much. We’ve lost six piggies since November (four in a little over a month), five of them from the same herd so it’s hit hard. We’re doing what we can to assure the health of the remaining piggies and I imagine in the coming months, once we are certain that everyone is healthy and strong and any infection has left, we will be bringing in new sows - and our solitary boar Vincent who lost his brother Theo a few weeks back will be having the snip and coming to be the new sow police!