This was on 25 February, we, guinygirlz Coco and Linn, visited a shelter in the south of the Netherlands. There we met the black and handsome boar Beer and sow Muffin. Both are teddies, Beer is a CH teddy and Muffin a US teddy. Coco started washing Muffin's eyes and ears within 15 minutes of meeting her. Beer was happily rumbling away and love to lie down next to his girls, especially Linn!
We love the new cuddle cup mom bought at the shelter, there's usually one, two or even three of us inside it!
These are the new pigs shelter mugshots
They joined our crew because sadly our boar Stevie suddenly passed away in a wheekend, so we will remember him especially during upcoming Peter Gurney memorial on 9 March.
Mom tried her hand at needle felting a piggy, based on a tutorial on Youtube. This again got its inspiration of the series available on (dutch) Netflix: Pui Pui Molcars, do look it up it's so cute according to mom and dad, and the guinea pig sounds are spot on!
It's me 'little' Linn, with Cookie (to the left) and Binky (in the back)
I'm watching you mom...
The piggies came to visit me in the laundry basket, while dad cleaned the cage
I haven't really been able to go down the stairs much after hip surgery, so they came to visit me in the, (in their opinion!) much too small, laundry basket.
Still watching you mom, do you have anything good there... Like veggies?
We hope every pig (and their owners) are doing well!
Hi everyone,
My name is Linn! I am a little over a year old.
My previous owners brought me to an animal shelter after my friends went over the rainbow bridge.
The animal shelter I came from is the 'dierenbescherming' slave thinks this is like the english RSPCA (=Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals). There was one lone piggy in the shelter, the others already had friends, that was me, I am glad Cookie and Binky liked me enough to take me home with them.
You probably already know my new friends, Cookie and Binky. Unfortunately they had to say goodbye to their friend Raani just before halloween, she had a saddle back and quite some bladder stones in the 3,5 years of her life.
I really like my new boar friend Binky, we love to lie next to each other in the cage. He is very big compared to me... Here we are sharing a leaf of endive (just before I ran of with his leaf again ;)
Though big, he and Cookie did loose weight since they meet me, I think all that running after me has made them more active.
I am a very vocal piggy, which slave Mikey likes a lot. Raani was also a little chatterbox at times, so she is happy I am a chatterbox as well.
At first I was rather afraid of taking veggies from the slaves. But the others always run up to the front of their cage, so I had to see what they were doing. I came here on 7 December 2019, and I now come to get my piece of veg, though occasionally I will steal a piece from the others. Slaves are sure I know my name, because when they call it out they can see me reacting. So after a week or so I learned when they are calling my name it means they have a piece of vegetable waiting for me. By now I have also learned that pills are okay, they others were so enthusiastic so I just had to try that. Slaves are glad I take the pills now, they say it will come in handy when I actually need pills, not sure what they mean by that...
I am not the best of friends with Cookie (yet), but she tolerates me most of the time. I do know she is safer then whatever is outside the cage and I tend to hide behind her or Binky whenever we get spooked by anything.
By now slave Mikey is pretty confident we get along well enough, ever since she found the three of us in and under our new hammock like this...
This was taken half an hour after the one above, we were still in the hammock. Cookie is with her back to us in the first pigture, if you can browse (press >) to the second pigture, you can see she was enjoying a bit of sunshine. Mom thinks Cookie might think she is a cat...
Today is Sinterklaas' birthday in the Netherlands!
Our human likes to eat chocolate letters (or maybe characters is a better word). This is a milk chocolate hazelnut one, an M as the first letter of our slave Mieke's name. Kids will get presents from Sinterklaas this evening.
Maybe he already was agent weight when he came to us, at least he has been in all the recent (back to august 2014) records slave could find about his weight, eitherway his Agent introduction is way overdue!
Slaves had a bit of trouble on deciding on a (nice) Agent name for our Berke. He can be a bit of a scaredy pants, but they did not want to give him that Agent name, so they settle for this one...
Introducing Agent Brave Sir Robin, this video says it all we think...
Well, you all know our Woopy died a few weeks ago. Slaves Mikey and E thought they would take their time finding a new piggy. They would like a Rex again, as Woopy was one. We only had one fuzzy piggie left, Roos and she is a US Teddy, not a rex, not that that looks very different...
As they wanted a rex and Mikey really wants to get a piggie from a shelter (as there are so many there already) they thought getting a new (rex) piggie would take some time...
However a collegue of Mikey had 4 babies from her two presumed boars and was looking for a good home for them. So we ended up with this little loud and fast thing: Tijger. Tijger by the way is just the dutch word for Tiger. She came with that name and it seems to suit her. She joined us on what would have been Woopy's 7th birthday: 16 April 2015.
This is Tijger, she is a mix of a peruvian dad and a US teddy mom. So we assume she will not get any teddy hair, but she has some longer tufts of hair after her dad. She was born in the night from 6-7 March this year.
She found out she can sit on the house
and ...
...eat her veg in peace,
As the others won't go there
Play with the toilet roll balls...
Eat hay..
Start a new trend by being
the first piggy not scared
to sit in the new basket!
We got a new friend, named Peaches, end of october...
This is what she looked like at the shelter. She was observing everything curiously from her house
Slaves tried to bond us three with her. She was curious, but very fierce, teeth chattering and even snorting at us
As this led to a lot of agitation, we were separated. Peaches turned out to be very scared, also for our slaves. We had to find out who our new boss was after Daisy died.
Peaches got used to slaves, but also got really bored. Bonding attempts failed...
At the end of the Christmas holidays, slaves tried to bond us again
Their plan was as follows:
1. Put all of us in a big run on neutral ground, with a fence in the middle. Peaches on one side, us three on the other side. They kept us in the run the whole afternoon, after about an hour it settled down a bit.
Having hay near the middle fence really helped there (Food = distraction and eating = social activity)!
2. The next day we switched sides. Again we were distracted with food.
3. Later that day the fence was opened, both the middle and the surrounding fence. This way we were given a bigger area to explore and to get to know each other. This way we could get away from each other if we wanted to. Berke did a great job protecting his ladies Woopy and Roos.
4. The fenced of area was closed again, making the area with all four of us smaller again. Again Berke kept doing a good job, and at some point Peaches accepted that. Victory!
5. We were put together in a thoroughly cleaned cage.
All four of us together in our cage! Sorry for the bad picture quality. Roos is in stealth mode. Her red brown color and the red brown cage wall make her practically invisible.
Slaves had a hard time putting us together, and they want to say keep trying as long as nobody gets really hurt (blood drawn). Also don't try to separate us too quick, Mikey found it really hard to not separate us once we started chattering and nipping at each other.
So as you probably remember t Kuufke was the shelter who won our donation for this years' Undercover guinea pigs Calendar proceeds. We donated a total of 150 euros to them, they were really happy with it, and let us know that 6 boars can be neutered with our donation (Sorry guys!). This will help those guys find a new home with one or more nice sows.
Thanks everyone for making the calendar possible again by sending in lovely pigture, and buying the calendar. I want to send a special thank you to the people who donated extra, you know who you are ;) Of course we couldn't not show you a bit of the shelter, so here is a short impression
Some of the cages at t Kuufke....
The big pen with elderly piggies and other piggies that will not be rehomed
Spencer, he reminded us very much of our late Chico
Farouk, Piaras in the back
One of the piggies in the elderly group
The shelter also takes care of gerbils, hamsters, mice, rabbits... And these two Chinchilla's...
and Degus, this is the ladies group: a big pile of degus...
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