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

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!