Friday, August 26, 2016

Friday video: Problems with eating and Therapy for piggies?

Hi all,

This will have a video, but I am mostly writing because I am curious if you ever heard of this or possibly even have experience with it....

So in the last month, we have visited our vet twice with Tijger. She is a feisty little girl, but she was getting even littler...
Turns out she had her molars forming a bridge over her tongue, making it very hard for her to eat. This was corrected 3 weeks ago, and again on yesterday. If we continue at this rate, it will mean monthly dental work session for Tijger (and very empty wallets for our slaves, but that is not the most important thing).
So our vet wants to find out what is causing this quick recurrence of overgrowing molars. Because she feels, like us, that monthly dental work is not a preferred treatment. She took x rays of Tijger's jaw and corrected her teeth yesterday. It seems to her there are no big problems in her jaw, and she did not see any infections or other irritations in Tijger's mouth. Her theory is that this problem could be caused by Tijger's jaw muscles, which could be locked or something, not enabling her to make all the necessary jaw movements. A possible treatment for this could be to get her to an osteopath for guinea pigs... Unfortunately here in the Netherlands, there are only 3 vets knowledgable and certified to do this. Fortunately the Netherlands is not a very big country and 2 of the 3 vets are within an hours drive from us...

So I am really curious, have any of you, our readers, ever heard of Osteopathy of chiropractic threatments for Guinea pigs? Or do you even have experience with this? We would love to hear your thoughts on it!

Our vet thinks there are 3 options: Do dental corrections probably every month,
See an osteopath to see if we can correct her problems by giving her chiropractic treatments,
or give up (and basically have her put to sleep, or let her suffer).

Tijger is about one and a half year old, and when she is not having teeth problems, she is feisty, smart and loves to eat. She really wants to eat as well, and keeps trying. Yesterday after the aneastethic seemed to have worn of, she was even rumbling at the others...She seems to be doing far too well to say goodbye to her already, in our opinion.

We found 2 videos of a guinea pig having trouble eating (it's kind of eerie how much alike the wear on that guinea pig's teeth(Zenna) look compared to Tijger's front teeth):
One of her eating very slowly, basically Tijger eating parsley looks pretty much the same


And a video of how she could eat again after two chiropractic treatments:


Love to hear your thoughts on this topic!
Have a good wheekend,
Slave Mikey and our Guinygirlz: Peaches, Tijger, Raani and boar Berke

4 comments:

  1. Small update: Next friday, Tijger has an appointment at a vet, who can also do chiropractic treatment! I will keep you posted about this visit

    ReplyDelete
  2. We have never come across this problem, we are all keeping our paws crossed that treatment works.

    ReplyDelete
  3. We have never come across this problem, we are all keeping our paws crossed that treatment works.

    ReplyDelete
  4. My husband visits a chiropractor but I don't think that he does anything like this. I would be intrigued to know if it works and hope very much that it does.

    I wish that my long time Rodentologists were still around so that I could send them these videos. They were brilliant at sorting out piggy dental problems without the need for an anaesthetic and some piggies visited them frequently for a trim.

    ReplyDelete