Piggy A-Z: E for Eyes

 I don't know about other guinea pig owners, but we had multiple piggies injuring their eyes, by for example running into a pile of hay with their eyes wide open... emerging with a bit of hay sticking out of the eye

Our Roos was one of the best at getting eye injuries, especially on days when the vets are closed, like new year's day. In the picture below she had scraped the surface of her eye. The vet was a bit afraid it might not heal, but after a week (or two) her eye was completely back to normal.

The vet had not seen eye damages like this before so he took this picture:

Luckily, most of the times it is not too hard for piggy eyes to heal. What our vets have always done is apply this coloured fluid onto the eye. They would then flush the eye clean with a bit of water, the yellow colour that remains on the eye shows where the eye is damaged. As you can see in the pigture Roos pretty much scraped the whole surface of her eye...
Depending on how deep/severe the damage is an eye cream containing vitamin A and with or without antibiotic properties is given. We then needed to apply drops of the cream on the eye, and it seems really miraculous, but so far the eyes have always healed real quickly.

Have your piggies ever damaged their eyes? Do your vets treat it the same way?
Slave Mikey

Piggy A-Z: E for eggplant (shaped)

Guess who's the vegetable and who is the piggy?

We think eggplant, or aubergine as we call it, is not suitable for piggies, but a healthy piggy should be eggplant shaped ;)

P.s. Doesn't Raani have the cutest bum? Signed slave to the Guinygirlz, Mikey

Piggy A-Z: D for Do It Yourself (DIY): a fleece pillow

Some weeks ago I made a little photo tutorial on how to make a very simple guinea pig pillow. We bought one like this when we got Bérke, a couple of years ago. We could easily have made a pillow like this, and will show you how below, but we liked to support the shelter where we got Ber by buying the pillow.
Btw, on world animal day (4 October) it was  Berke's 5 birthday, so belated carrotbeers all around!

So what do you need to make a pillow for your guinea pig?

- Fleece fabric (one or two colors, more if you want it to be multi colored, but for this tutorial I will use two colors), preferably washed (so it has already shrunk if it does that)
- A sewing machine, or needle (and some handsewing skills)
- Thread

- Pins
- Teddy bear / Fibre filling
- Scissors
- Chalk (or something else you can use to mark your fabric)
- measuring device, like a ruler or measuring tape.

Decide how big you want your pillow to be,
add some seams (All round) to that number and
draw that rectangle on one of your fleece fabrics

Cut out the rectangle and put your cut-out rectangle on top
of your other piece of fleece fabric.

Pin the rectangle to the other colour fleece
and cut it out

Fleece has a wrong and a right side. In general
The fuzzy side is seen as the right side, and
the very smooth often slightly shiny side
is the wrong side of the fabric.
However feel free to use the side you like on the outside

Put the right sides together and pin. This means
the wrong sides (the sides you what on the inside
of the pillow) are on the outside.
Unless you want the seams on the outside then
you put wrong sides together and pin

Sew together 3 sides of the rectangle,
to make sure the treads stay in place
sew forward, a bit back and forward again,
at the beginning and end of your sewing. 

Most sewing machines have
a button to sew back.
Leave one shorter side open.
To turn in the corner,
put the needle through the layers of fabric,
 lift the foot and turn.
Put the foot down again and continue

If you want seams on the inside (!): Cut of the 
corners off the side you just sewn (as shown)

This makes for a more defined corner 
when you turn it inside out.

If you want the seams on the inside, turn inside out,
 otherwise don't turn. Stuff and pin closed.
Fold the seams inside if you want seams in the inside

Here it is pinned closed with seams folded inside

Sew the short side closed, again go forwards and
back at beginning and end of your sewing
This is how it looks sewn on one side

And the other side.

It's done now and can be given to your piggies!

As far as I know fleece can be washed (not too warm though!) And the filling is washable too, might be useful to check if you can wash the filling when buying it.

Enjoy, if your slaves make a pillow for you we would love to see them!

Slave Mikey, as requested by her Guinygirlz and Bérke to make this tutorial

Piggy A-Z: D for Dunya and Daisy

We used to have piggies with names starting with a D, so for our Piggy A-Z we got Dunya and Daisy!
Dunya was a lovely himalayan, and Daisy was a gorgeous round silver agouti US teddy.
We never had them together, but they were (more or less coincidentally) named after the main characters of a Dutch TV show named Dunya and Daisy. Only we liked the spelling for Daisy better, in the tv series it is Desi, read a bit more about the series here
As with many popular youth series they also had their own movie. Dunya and Desi is about two friends, Dunya is from Moroccan decent and Desi is a very dutch girl, the series shows differences in how they were raised and how that influences their friendship.

Here are some videos of Dunya and Daisy from a few years ago...

This a video of Dunya and her old cage mates Lotje and Guiny (my first group of piggies).
Look closely to see why Lotje seems so mean to Dunya...


And Daisy sleeping... Daisy is sleeping in the middle (see her ears flap?) other silver agouti is Lily. Woopy is lounging under the hay rack...


And Roos disturbs Daisy's slumber...


Have a great wheekend,
The guinygirlz Peaches, Tijger, Raani and boar Berke

Piggy A-Z: C for Cucumber

Mom found us some cute little cucumbers at work...

Cucumber tug of war!

Tijger enjoying a snack cucumber

Berke

Berke and Peaches reaching for the cucumber

Success!

Yummy!

Do you like cucumbers?

Grtz,

The guinygirlz Peaches and Tijger, Boar Berke... and the new girl...

Piggy A-Z: C for Carrot tops

We love green spaghetti, aka carrot tops!!!

 

Wheeks,

 The Guinygirlz (Tijger & Peaches in the pigtures)

Double B, for the piggy A-Z: Agent Brave sir Robin aka Bérke

Hi there,

Today we have a double B for our Piggy A-Z: our agent Brave sir Robin, also known as Bérke.

Bérke came to join the guinygirlz herd after our Lily left us. The guinygirlz and their slave Mikey had quite some fun looking at the website of the shelter they would visit to find a new friend. The Kuufke shelter in the south of the Netherlands has all their piggies that are up for adoption on their website with a pigture and a little info about them. They already knew quite some weeks before hand that they would go to the shelter, but that also meant they saw quite some nice piggies pass by that were already adopted by the time they got to visit t Kuufke.
Bérke was definetly Mikey's favorite from the pigtures on the site. Our cousins from auntie Janneke also visited the shelter the same day and they arrived before we did. They got to date Bérke first! Mom was rather worried they would get along, leaving us to find another friend... but apparently none of them were interested in each other Phew. Bérke and the guinygirlz at that time (Daisy, Roos and Woopy) did seem to like each other. Woopy was already quite old at that time, so mom worried a bit the excitement would not be good for her. But she seemed fine with him and just was staying calm and relaxed on meeting him. Daisy however was a it more feisty, she probably already took over the role of boss piggy at that time without us realizing that, but Bérke seemed to like that.

Bérke is also featuring in the card game we made.

As you might be able to see, he looks quite a lot like one of our slaves first piggies: Guiny. She joined Lotje a nice happy redhead as a little piggy. She soon became boss and ruled the cage. She often seemed to need to determine with dad who was boss, she always found she should be the boss of them, but she never won from the human. Slaves would say she was a boar in a sows skin, sometimes we wonder if Bérke is Guiny's reincarnatio and she did really get back as a boar ;)

So if you are still interested in getting an undercover guinea pigs card game, you can still order them! They are 12,50 euro each, plus shipping costs. The good thing is they fit in an envelope easily, which means shipping is not that expensive. Sending a game to the US is 3,45 euro. For current exchange rates google ' eur in usd' for example ' 12.50 eur in usd' and google will tell you what it would cost in us dollars. Mikey likes to use paypal for the payments. If you have no paypal account, we think you can do a one time payment without having to get an account.
If you want to order on or more games, please fill out the form here.
Also know that once the first batch is sold, the proceeds will be donated to a guinea pig shelter somewhere in the world. You can nominate a shelter and that we will vote on a shelter to determine which one gets the proceeds... We hope you will join in the fun!

The Guinygirlz and Boar Bérke

B (Piggy A-Z): Introducing Agent Boo

Peaches has been on Agent weight (aka 1000 grammes / 1 kg) on and off during this year, but she has never been introduced as an agent. First time she reached Agent weight was already in march this year, and she went down in weight and reached agent weight again in April, June, July and November... So she as been going up and down, but it did not seem to affect her, and it never got really low, or high for that matter.

Anyway, she deserves an introduction as an Agent, as this has been long overdue, especially when looking at the first time she reached Agent weight.

So without much further ado I would like to introduce to you: Agent Boo!

Why Agent Boo? Well, I guess you are all not hardcore gamers, as I am also not, so it's a bit harder to explain. My boyfriend E referenced to Boo, the giant miniature space hamster, when talking about Peaches when we first got her. She was really hard to set up with the other piggies, as she would go from nice to psycho piggy in about a minute. Boo was the companion of a computer character (back in the old days) called Minsc in game the Baldur's Gate. Minsc would talk to Boo in the game, and shout things like 'Go for the eyes, Boo!' If you want to read more about Boo see this link.
Next to Peaches looking like a giant Hamster, the description Minsc would give Boo, did sound a bit like the ferocious Peaches we had at first.
Luckily nowadays Peaches a rather nice piggy, and she loves to cuddle with Roos, her biggest enemy at first.

Agent Boo, together with Agent Tortoise on the right

Hope you all have some lovely Christmas days,

Mieke

p.s. You can still order the Undercover guinea pigs card game, the first have been send already. More info in this post. All proceeds will go to a guinea pig shelter somewhere in the world, which you can nominate and vote for yourselves

B is for Brownie

Our current herd has no piggies who's names begin with B.

But we did have a Brownie once - she was sweet as could be! 

She'd snuggle and kiss and never would miss

A chance to show off her great piggy lips!

Brownie was a pig we had for only a short while but she was awesome!  

One of our piggies died unexpectedly and the two remaining pigs were very sad.  Brownie's friend had also died the same day as ours, and she was so sad she stopped eating.  Her family was looking to find a home where Brownie could live the rest of her days with other piggies, as they weren't able to add more furry family members at the time (brownie was 5.5 years old at this point).  

She integrated very easily into our small herd and was loved dearly.  Sadly Brownie had a heart condition and she passed away as a result of it just two short months later.  We didn't have her for long but she made a big imprint on our hearts!  She was so sweet and outgoing and had the cutest bum we'd ever seen!  One tuft of brown fur curved left and one tuft of orange fur curved right, giving her the perfect heart-shaped bum!  We could never get enough of it.  Don't you think it's cute?! 

A Piggy A-Z. B is for Banana

Not all piggies enjoy bananas. Of our current herd, less than half like banana but Lola Piggyfriend loves it.

"Please peel a banana for me. I only have about an inch at a time but banana is yummy!" says Lola.

Some of the Piggyfriends like the peel too but it needs a wash first and the sticky label removed.

Slave says that banana is like Marmite - one either detests it or loves it - she hates both. Her deputy Slave loves both and takes a banana to work with him every day.

Piggies that would normally run and hide from a banana will often enjoy it as part of a syringe feeding regime. It is easy to mash and draw up into a 1ml. syringe. Bananas are especially useful for a piggy suffering with diarrhoea as they are an important source of potassium, which is quickly lost at this time.

Do any piggies reading this like banana?

We are still hoping that a piggy whose name begins with a B will send in his/her pigture. Slave is always sneaking up on us with her camera but we love to see other piggies too.

B (Piggy A-Z): Introducing Agent Bouncy ball

Hi all,

Here another post for B in the piggy A-Z series.
My name is Tijger (this means Tiger in Dutch) and since a week or two I have reached agent weight, which means I am now a 1000 grammes or one kilo(gram)! *Proud* I am now 9 months old...

So slave decided I will be agent Bouncy ball, because I can be really active and bouncing through the cage. Also when sitting on slave's lap, I cannot sit still. Have you ever seen the video slaves made of me? I wasn't freaking out or anything I am just that hyperactive ;)

Tijger is not a #lap piggy, she will not sit still, she gets that from her dad ;) #adventurous #guineapig

A video posted by Mieke (@pandameisje) on Aug 2, 2015 at 4:49am PDT

So in my new role as an actual undercover agent Bouncy ball(!) I will give a little report on what just happened this evening...

This is me, enjoying one of my favorite activities:
Eating

Mommy was loudly playing something called 'Christmas songs', singing and dancing along, as dad brought some big green thing down. They have a plastic one due to dad being allergic to practically anything (plants and animals). Luckily one of the few things he did not test as allergic for are us piggies :)

Then mom started to put lights in the green thing she calls a tree. They are quite pretty, she is happy that this year she finally has colored LED lights. Roos tells me she is happy with these new lights as well, which are either on or off, as the old one had 7 settings, mostly flashing the lights in different sequences or speeds...

Then mom put all kinds and sizes of colored balls in the tree, she looked proud after having put all the christmas ornaments we own in the tree. Apparently she never managed to do that before...

Then she found out she had one unused chain of lights, well, next to the flashing one, and she decided to decorate our cage as well...

What do you guys think? At first we were a bit apprehensive, but we are fine with them now. She also added some tinsel, and a few ornaments. Quite some years ago, the year Woopy was born, that was back in 2007, mom got a few wooden guinea pig ornaments from Tammy of Cavymadness as part of a secret santa gift exchange.

Here you can see Berke with the piggy ornament looking into our cage

Berke stuffing his face,
with the wooden ornament observing him

Well, I hope you liked my report, we would love to see how your cages look!

Signing off,
Agent Bouncy ball

A Piggy A-Z. B is for Bosworth Piggyfriend

We think that we have exhausted "A" so we are moving onto B in our Piggy A-Z.

This is me, Bosworth aka Agent Plantagenet. I am a silver/grey Ridgeback boar with ruby eyes. Slave has a thing for piggies with red or ruby eyes ( although she loves us all equally ). As you can see, I enjoy tearing up a box with my friend, Rafferty.

Here I am again. Slave tried to take a photo showing my ridge but, because I am a self coloured piggy, it doesn't show up very well. Never mind. I know that Jim, Agent F1, has the same problem. Show Ridgebacks have a much more pronounced ridge along their backs so I would never win a prize but who cares? I'd rather eat than be taken to a show.

And here I am again with my best friend, Rafferty. He is a Peruvian so has a long time to wait until we get to "P" or "R" so he is getting a preview here. He is a pure bred Peruvian but Slave cuts his coat so that he see and play. We both love grass, parsley and dandelions.

Are you a piggy whose name begins with "B"? If so, we'd love to see your pigture and you can add a story too if you wish. It is as easy as sending an email with an attachment. Find the Contribute button at the top of our page, click on it and follow the very easy instructions. Later on we will post other piggy related topics beginning with B.

A Piggy A - Z. A is for Antibiotics

Sometimes piggies get sick and we need to be given Antibiotics to make us well again. At Piggyfriends, we use what is called Septrin in England but this is known by other names as you can see on our bottle, which was sent to us from the US and has the name Sulfamethoxazole and Trimethoprim on the label. That's a lot for a piggy to type and spell right! This is very safe for piggies and has a nice flavour too. This one is grape but we usually have banana. It is a suspension and needs to be shaken vigorously to mix the ingredients. We are given 1ml. twice a day. That's a 1ml syringe in our photo so we have a full one for each dose.

Our vet keeps baytril, tribrissen and marbocyl and these are piggy safe but baytril can cause an upset tum so Slave sticks to our Septrin.

Some antibiotics are deadly for piggies. We must never be given penicillin. Our Slave knows only too well how dangerous this is as she was given it as a child in hospital and suffered anaphylactic shock.

Slave decided it was too risky for one of us to sit on the shiny kitchen counter for this photo so we have used stand-ins. These piggies were a present from Slave's son on her birthday. We love them as they don't eat our veggies.

A Piggy A-Z - A is for Agent

A is for Agent, without whom this blog would not be written as we depend on our Undercover Piggies to bring us all of these stories and pigtures.

We would like to introduce two new Agents, Cosmo and Casper Piggyfriend. We are not sure if they have actually reached Agent weight as they do not sit on the scale long enough for our Slave to read it but they certainly put away the veggies and they have grown a lot since they arrived here as little piglets.

Here is Cosmo, doing what he does best - eating.

And here is his close-up.

Below is his best friend, Casper. They are not brothers, all though they look almost identical but were part of a huge rescue and are probably related somehow.

"What?" says Casper. "You do not expect me to come out in the open to have my photo taken!" This is the best that we could do.....

He wanted to stay under his pigloo! How do we tell them apart? Other than that Cosmo is the brave one and Casper is the scaredy-pig, Cosmo has a grey nose and Casper's is pink.

They have chosen the joint name of the Dangermice as their Agent name. For overseas readers, Dangermouse is a secret agent cartoon mouse and he is white as well. He is a lot braver than our Casper but Cosmo reckons that he is tough enough for both of them.

When they were little, Slave called them her sugar mice, after the candies that she loved as a child and the name stuck.

A piggy A-Z: more Agouti's (& US Teddies for Go fish! game)

Hi all,

As promised quite some time ago for the Go Fish! game, mom would still send in a nice pigture of me, Roos. I have taken things in my own paws, as she still hasn't done it!
Plus I am an Agouti, which makes me fit in the A category of the piggy A-Z. And one of our late beauties Lily also was an agouti, and we had more like Woopy, Toby & Daisy. Let's just say our slaves have a weakness for agouti rexes and US teddies...

This is me, Roos. I am named after a flower (Rose, only in Dutch), as were my predecessors Lily and Daisy. Mum really likes this pigture because you can really see my color very well. I am what we think is called a golden Agouti. My hairs are red (sort of orangy rusty red) with black tipping. I think you can also see that very well in this pigture. You can see under my chin (and on my tummy) that I have the red colour underneath, just like Angelina has a solid color underneath.
I was once a present for my human dad, which was now 3 years ago, in a few weeks I will turn 4 years old! I am a very sweet piggy, but since the passing of Daisy, I have become the boss of my herd. I like to be petted and puddle by my humans, even when I am in the cage I won't run away and usually lay down, and get really flat and wide as a puddle of goo would (only much cuter of course!)
When the humans stop petting me, I usually look up as if to say 'Hey, don't stop!'.

This was Lily, she was a silver agouti with some white. Here she just had a bath and she is smiling... she liked baths. She was one of the first to like baths, she grew up on a farm and they had an outside run, with a warm hutch. She was probably used to getting her paws wet when walking outside into the grass with morning dew. Silveragouti's have silver colored hairs with black tips. She was sweet like me and totally adored our boar Chico then. Funny story. Chico would eat pellets (called SuperTrio, not sure if it is sold across the border) which were rather big. As Lily adored him she would of course also try to eat the pellets Chico ate, but she always looked funny when trying and did not seem to manage as a young piggy. Only later when mum saw a baby-sized variety of the supertrio she understood why Lily had always looked so funny when trying to eat the SuperTrio pellets... they were just to big for her little mouth! Luckily they did have other pellets she could eat, so she grew up to be a healthy piggy. Another small story (mum's at it now) Lily would love to sleep on Chico's back (so really on top of him) and Chico would be just fine with that. But at some point Chico thought 'hey, I want to sleep on top of Lily'. Well, Lily was not amused (not so strange knowing Chico was a hefty boar and Lily wasn't fully grown at that time) and ran away from him with a lot of complaining noises...

So if there are any more Agouti's out there, do join in the fun and send in pigtures (see the contribute tab above)!

Roos

A Piggy A-Z - A for Abyssinian

Here are two more Abyssinians for our "A".

These two are Roisin and Niamh, two little sisters who were the result of an accident when someone's prizewinning Peruvian and Abby got together by mistake so they came to live at Piggyfriends.

This is Roisin as a baby. You pronouce it Roshin.

And this is Niamh, pronounced Neeve.

And here we are all grown up. Abyssinians have rough coats, which stand up in rosettes, neatly arranged all over their body but as we two girls are only half Abyssinian, we would not win any prizes. Our Slave says that here at Piggyfriends all piggies are prizewinners! Abbies are usually smaller than the average piggy and are extroverts and we are no exception, bouncing around our pen and always shouting for food.

Niamh likes this pigture of herself as it shows her nice whiskers and, as you can see, we love to tear up cardboard boxes.