Piggy Update 12/21/2012

We're back! Woo! It's been a long time since we've made any post, and we blame it all on Blogger and Facebook (where we upload all our pics). We're busy with college stuff, so we didn't have the patience to learn the where's and how's of their new layout. We did learn to love the new Facebook, but we still hate new Blogger. Boooo!



We're currently preparing for the holidays. It's Mochi's first Christmas with us, hope she likes the noche buena more than she dislikes fireworks. Loki and I don't really mind fireworks, probably because we have each other, unlike Mochi, all alone, no idea where the strange noise is coming from. We'll make sure that our human keeps her comfy during the eves.

What have we been up to?

During our hiatus, we found more books on guinea pigs, I think we have three, which we'll do a review on soon.

We rescued another kitten and successfully adopted her out. More stories on that later.

Our human has been planning to dedicate her time in volunteering for the Philippine Animal Welfare Society, unfortunately she couldn't make it to the orientation this year, but! She did manage to take a lot of pictures when she visited the she rescue. We'll post about that later too.

Glad to be back ol' chap!

The Most Important Meal of The Day...

Serving it up, piggy's way! Bap! (It's a song from this human entertainment moving picture called SpongeBob Squarepants, it's pretty good).

Everyday our human prepares our nom noms, for breakfast and for dindin. Breakfast is very important for both piggies and humans! It energizes our body and rehydrates our mind. Go breakfast!

It's raining like crazy!

Humans (aka: Nomnomus Dispensurus) are known

to shed their multicolored skin during the monsoon season.

Amazing, lets go!

We love the rain, it keeps the grass fresh even if we can't eat them because they're highly polluted. We love the smell of wet soil, and the cool breeze that comes with the weather. But one thing we absolutely hate about tropical storms is how it keeps our human stranded at home.

Human stranded at home = no grocery kingdom = no veggies= sad sad sad piggies.

Based on our equation, we are very sad piggies. No veggies for us 'till tomorrow! *sad wheek*

Although Rainbow did manage to buy us natural hay (for secret reasons, we couldn't order Vitakraft meadow hay). After our past experience with natural hay, we never wanted to go back, but we had no choice. Our last batch was the worst! It was very yellow, dusty, and filled with these things we have no idea what they were but they were round and very pointy. It kept making holes on out human! This is unacceptable!

Pooping and eating. We piggies are known to multi-task!

But this new batch we recently bought is very different. It's softer, a little more green, no more pointy things, and it smells like oats. We're guessing that the grass that natural hay uses comes from various farms/meadows, hence different quality. Yum nom nom nom nom.

Vitakraft Meadow Hay Review!

We didn't expect to get two new piggy products on the same day; we knew about the Carefresh, but the hay caught us by surprise. Feels just like Christmas... So we got this hay from Princess Club Corp., same people who sold us long stalked timothy hay. We received a text message about PCC having meadow/natural hay from Belgium, at first we thought it was the Versele-Laga type, turns out we have Vitakraft.

Knowing Vitakraft's product line filled with not so good guinea food and treats, we had low expectations when we saw the brand name "Vitakraft" on our bag of hay. Vitakraft sells a lot of hay varieties, the one we have is meadow hay, we have a feeling that it's hay possibly from the meadows. In the packaging it says that Vitakraft hay is taken from the Alpine mountains, sounds delicious. 

  

Surprisingly, it's not that bad compared to all the other hays we've had, this is by far the best. It's very stringy, soft, and more green compared to natural hay, which was getting dustier, more yellow, and became harder every time we purchased a new pack. Our PCC timothy hay smelled the strongest, it was really hard and stalky, and talk about dusty. We're not sure if dusty is the right word, but the leaves were falling off, crumbling, and it eventually turned into powder. Vitakraft hay smells like rasins, and it's really not that strong or dusty like, we had to bury our face in it to figure out what to compare the smell with. If we can recall, Natural Hay smelled musky, and our PCC hay didn't smell bad but it was just really strong, like dried strawberries right in your face.

It's also cheap, P250 per pack, each pack weighs 1kg. It's very light (if you're human), but we feel like our hay is going to last us for... a month. Two months since we bought two. No, we have a feeling it's going to last us probably more than that. We're too lazy to compute on what's more economical to buy. We're guessing that if you want more hay for less, go with Versele-Laga, but if you want a tiny bit more quality, go with Vitakraft. Versele-Laga isn't really low quality hay, we remember loving that stuff! The ones we've previously bought must be an old stock that's been sitting in the pet store for months, or even years. It all depends... Personally, we like buying or trying out different brands as long as they're piggy safe, it makes life fun.

___________________________________________

Timothy pellets!

We keep getting text messages from PCC about their new items for sale. Not that we're complaining. PCC's selling timothy pellets for P150 per 500 grams. Minimum order is five packs, but if you're interested in buying less than that, you could go buy it at their place, where? We don't know. Go ask. They're in Facebook and Sulit.

The pellets are from USA, the brand is called ASI Pellet, Ripon USA. We looked it up and we can't find enough information about it. All we know is that it's marketed for horses. Unless we know about the ingredients, we're staying skeptical. We know that it doesn't have vitamin C, but that could easily be supplemented by Lemon Cee, fresh grass, and veggies. We're just worried about the added vitamins and probably anti-biotics or whatevers mixed in it. Anyone willing to try it out, please do share info about it! Wheek.

Carefresh Review!

It's finally here! And it's smaller than we thought, we imagined it would be the same size as our Natural Hay package thing. So here it is.. Carefresh. So exciting. Let the review begin!


Carefresh is a brand known for its pet/environmentally safe and high quality pet bedding. Other than bedding they also produce small animal feeds. Carefresh is owned by Absorption Corp., a company dedicated in manufacturing products for the small pet industry. Although Carefresh is what they're popularly known for, the company also owns other brands such as Arm & Hammer and Biofresh (probably the new name for Carefresh, but more commercialized for lab animals).

There are different kinds of Carefresh beddings; natural, ultra, confetti, colors, and basic blend. What we have here is natural Carefresh, made from cellulose fiber, also known as natural fiber, any kind of material based on plants. For Carefresh, their natural fiber comes from wood pulp. Ultra is the same as natural except it's bleached, some consumers have reported that Ultra is the best among the other Carefresh products, it's made out of the same thing but Ultra is somehow softer. Colors is the same as ultra except it's colored. Confetti is a mixture of natural and colors. Basic blend is a mixture of natural and wood shavings. There are more types being made, with different mixtures, textures, and materials.

We bought our Carefresh Natural from Herpaholic (Pets Supply Depot, you can go find them on Facebook) for P500. The texture is very nice and soft much like cardboard. The smell... If you've ever lived in a box, especially in a balikbayan box, or at least stuck your whole head in one, that's exactly how Carefresh natural smells like. Wood pulp must be a fancy word for cardboard. A lot of humans have been praising this Carefresh natural, but there is also an equal amount of humans who dislike the product. Some claim that it's too dusty, it caused their master piggy, master chinchilla, master snake and the likes respiratory problems, and intestinal blockage due to bedding consumption. It even states in the package to feed snakes away from the bedding to prevent digestion problems. We do agree with those who don't like the bedding; the best part about the bedding is that it's soft, the cardboard smell isn't as strong as wood shavings but it's still irritating to the nose. Dustiness isn't that obvious but you can still sense that there is dust through the nose irritation we just mentioned. Mochi isn't a fan of it.

If we had to chose between our homemade bedding and Carefresh... Homemade FTW! Because of the smell, dust, and price. The only nice thing about Carefresh is the softness, but I bet my piggy butt that we can also make our homemade Carefresh just as soft. Watch out!

Homemade Carefresh in Progress...

 -We apologize for the lack of pictures in this post due to FB and blogger, in relation to posting pics using URLs-

It's actually more than it seems, the bag we used is a very narrow and tall paper bag. We used it because we think it's pretty. We could have finished making this 3-4 days ago, but we kind of missed a few steps. We didn't know that we were suppose to squeeze out the water first, as in one hand full at a time. What we did here was put all the paper in a net bag and squeezed the whole thing then hung it up to let it dry. Just yesterday we learned about the squeezing the water part so we realized the no-no we just made. After we did that, the drying process turned out to be faster. We also should have rinsed more to wash the ink away. We'll probably do that with our next batch, here we used one whole text book (really old and of no use anymore), the paper was a little thick so next time we'll use newspaper to see the difference.

Can't wait for our Carefresh to arrive this Tuesday! Then we can do some comparing, a review, and a step by step how to on homemade Carefresh. Joy!

Litter Training and Wheat Grass Seeds!

-We apologize for the lack of pictures in this post due to technical errors with FB and Blogger in relation to posting pics using URLs-

O hai piggy friends! Sorry we haven't been updating as we usually do, we've been busy little piggies. Since our cage is bigger now, we're working double time trying to poop everywhere. Human has also been busy doing... Human stuff. But that doesn't mean we forgot all about her! No.

Recently we've been doing some litter training! It's working great with Mochi, but not so good with Loki and I. One thing we've learned is that we piggies naturally like peeing in one area, if you check under our fleece (if you're using fleece) only one part of the towel is stained. Aha... So "training" us to pee in a plastic pan is no problemo, we'll happily go wee-wee there. Pooping is another story and the tricky part of litter training, if not impossible. As piggies, we cannot control our pooping, if we have to go, WE. HAVE. TO. GO. We don't really understand how the few guinea pigs out there do it, but this is probably why people suggest to put hay near or on the pan because who doesn't like pooping at the same place they eat?

We're still unsure what litter to use, at first we thought about wooden pellets but if you think about it, it's just like wood shavings but in pellet form. Almost all the down sides of wood shavings are still present in wood pellets like the possible strong smells and feet irritation. In addition, wood pellets turn dusty when wet, it's very heavy, and not to mention more expensive than shavings (based from where we live). So far we've found four "brands" of wooden pellets... We actually forgot the names; one is commercialized for "small pets", one for cats, one we can't read because it's written in another human language, and last can be purchased at Polo Club.

Currently we're now using shredded paper, before it was toilet paper. It's not really the best, but it shall do for now! The problem with both is that it smells. That's all. We already ordered Carefresh from Herpaholic, we'll get it by Tuesday! Can't wait! It cost P500, no idea how big it's suppose to be and how long it will last. We've also made some homemade Carefresh! We're going to compare our homemade with the real stuff just to see what's up.

And chadaaa! We bought wheat grass seeds! We purchased it at Sulit.com.ph, from this friendly human who has found his way into our "favorite humans" list. Very easy to talk to and delivery was fast and cheap, this is a huge compliment after our recent and first experience with the 2 week delay from a certain courier... So we bought a kilo for P500. They're just seeds with instructions, we haven't done anything yet with our seeds other than take pictures of it. We just got it now, and we haven't really thought about the soil and tray part. We're trying to see if buying seeds can save us more money than buying a pack of wheat grass from the grocery. So, yeah that's what's been happening around our piggy nest. Litter, seeds, and Mochi-Mochi.

Mochi's Vet Visit: Piggy Deworming!

-We apologize for the missing pics, due to technical issues, will fix it soon enough!-

Rainbow finally took Mochi (formerly known as Adler) to the vet at Cartimar. The day was all drizzly so the weather was perfect for a piggy trip, although that didn't stop Mochi from panicking. All the buses and jeeps kept barking in the streets, who wouldn't be afraid of that? They took a really long time out there, we began to worry about our new neighbor, what if the vet found something serious? We felt relief once she came back all happy and healthy, ready to share us her experience.

There were a lot of giant human mounts in the streets that time, all squeezed together in a small narrow road. Human and Mochi arrived at the clinic but they had to wait for a while since doc was still stuck in traffic (which explains why they took so long to come back). There were only a few patients in the clinic, mostly only humans who were there to pick up meds. It was Mochi's first time to be there, so Human had to register her first. In the mean time, the other docs took Mochi out to take note of her weight, everyone thought she was pregnant. Doc finally arrived and took a good look at Mochi, feeling her tummy and squeezing it. Mochi said she didn't mind but Human looked like she was the felt uncomfortable with the squeezing.

Yes Mochi, please tell us your story...

Doc confirmed that Mochi isn't pregnant (woohoo!), she's just extremely fat. Human also mentioned Mochi's nails and asked if it was normal to have crooked fingers. Doc said no (aww...). Mochi then got her nails trimmed, she said she really liked how doc handled her, she didn't mind being carried around like a human baby while her nails were being done.

Mochi's check-up was finished off with a tiny dose of deworming. We were curious about this deworming thing, it was the first time we ever heard of it after so many trips to the vet. It turns out that deworming is recommended for us piggies to take once every year. It works the same as deworming for other animals like livestock, dogs, and rabbits. It's not really necessary but it's one way to be safe.

As a reminder for us when our
next deworming will be! Reading through
the list, the word "euthanasia" never fails
to give us the heeby jeebies.

Cage v 6!

-We apologize for the lack of pictures due to technical problems, we will soon have this fixed-

We finally relocated to our original spot, the one we used to stay in during pre-Jónsi era. We now have a 2x4 which is currently divided into two to share space with Adler, we couldn't make it two storied because we ran out of connectors. It's very annoying how there are so many grids and few connectors, if only they sold these separately then we wouldn't have to buy another set.

All this moving... is making me.. Zzz...

So far so good, now our home is bigger/wider, more room for our piggy manliness, and soon (hopefully), a room mate for Adler.

So we've been doing background checks on Adler's breed
and we never knew satin guinea pigs are prone to
sever health problems!

O hai!

Me and Loki in a plastic jar. Wheek!

My name is Panda, I'm an American short haired guinea pig. As I type this, I am currently four months old and happily living with Loki, my cage mate. Loki is like a brother to me, and like most siblings we tend to have our disagreements. Thankfully, our pet human built us a cage big enough for us to get away from each other when we feel like it. Don't worry, like most siblings, we always forgive each other by the end of the day.

Me and Loki, decided to make a tiny blog about our life as guinea pigs. With help from our pet human, we have successfully made our first post. Tadaah!