Book Reiew: Training Your Guinea Pig

Our Human found this book months ago, it's about the basics of guinea pig training *giggles*.

Click to zoom in.

We haven't really tried any of the techniques taught here, but they do sound possible to do. Not much information about the authors. We've read the whole book, and the problem with guinea pig books is that most of them aren't updated, and this one was, lets say, 80% updated.

We like how it included C&C cages, the importance of having at least two guinea pigs, and hay 24/7. The parts we didn't like so much was the "female and male guinea pigs never fight" statement, and the idea of walking us on a leash.

NO.

Guinea leashes or harnesses aren't cool, it can cause a lot of damage and stress. To start off, our skeletal structure isn't suitable for it, unlike cats and dogs, it's not flexible or wide enough to make a jacket fit. As prey animals, we like to be cautious of out surroundings, hence bringing us to the outside world with open spaces, strange noise, and even stranger humans, can stir up a lot of trouble. Not to mention we have a strange thing wrapped around our chest and a mysterious force pulling us in every direction. There are too many wrong scenarios that could happen with a harness, plus we hate it. If you want us to experience the great outdoors, we would be happier sitting on fresh grass, in an enclosed pen, with human supervision.

This is a very nice book with really cute pictures in it, and great training ideas. We love how it encourages piggy-human interaction, hopefully a revised version would come up without the leash chapter and with more updated information.

Want to teach your piggies tricks? We found this very nice site, it offers guinea pig training techniques for free, with videos. It's called Guinea Pig Agility.com