Trying out the new food.

"We are going to try out the new bag of food today." announces Niamh Piggyfriend. " Tyrion has sorted out some dishes and we are going to put one in each pen and see who likes it."

Otto tries it first as he is senior pig. " This is yummy, Niamh!" " I tried it and I liked it too," says Niamh, " but you don't want to see my pigture every day."

Here is Louis tucking in. He had a lot of tooth problems when he came to Piggyfriends and is picky about food but he likes this. All Slaves should know that you must never suddenly change our feed  so you can see that Louis has a dish of his usual mix as well as did we all.

Carter is always to the fore when food is on offer and here he is enjoying the new nibble but his girls were not interested in it. "Come and try this!" he says between mouthfuls.

" We cannot let Carter eat it all," say Saoirse and Aoife. " Oh, it is really nice." they agree.

Fernando is enjoying it but his brother, Martin is camera shy. He did join in later but ran and hid when we tried to take a photo.

And here is Casper completing the taste test.

"We tried everypig with the new food," says Niamh," but we are sure that you do not want to see that many pigtures. Everypig enjoyed it and when we have completed our test of the treats, we are going to write to Kirk and tell him about it."

Look out for our next post when we test one of the treat boxes.

We have a surprise parcel!

" Look guys!" calls Otto Piggyfriend. " The postman has brought this parcel and it is addressed to us!"

"See! It has our name on it. I wonder what is inside?" asks Otto as the Piggyfriends gather round to inspect the parcel.

"Let's open it" says Niamh. " I have the scissors." " Be careful with those Niamh," cautions Otto. "They are the ones that Slave uses to cut my hair and they are very sharp."

The Piggyfriends look on in amazement at all the goodies inside. "There is a letter from a nice man called Kirk, who works at Westland Horticultural." reads Niamh. " I've seen Slave using their compost. They are making food for small animals too now and this is a press release telling people all about their new products."

"There are boxes of treats with fruits, veggies and flowers." says Niamh. " We will all try these out and see which ones we like."

Niamh studies a care booklet that came in the package. " I am so pleased that they recommend that we eat grass and hay as those are our favourites. That is a nice photo of a piggy eating parsley." says Niamh.

" Let us try this bag of food first." suggests Niamh. " Go and round up some dishes and I will put some in each for us all to taste. Thank you Kirk."

The Piggyfriends will tell you about their taste testing in their next post.

Note to our readers. If you would like to know more about these foods, go to www.naturesfeast.co.uk, where you can read all about them.

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

(Friday) Video: New boar also running

Is it still Friday somewhere in the world? It isn't here in the Netherlands, but we didn't want to deprive you of this video.

I guess we mentioned it before that sadly our boar Bérke had to leave us... 😭😢
Last weekend we got to date with a new boar, so have a look at the handsome boar, named Binky (for now), that we took home with us!
He also enjoys running around the cage (do turn on the sound as you watch, he's a bit heavier thus louder). It's best when we run around the cage with the three of us, but so far we didn't allow slave to catch that on camera...

Our newest addition addition Binky, likes to run just as the girls do #guineapig #running

A post shared by Mieke (@pandameisje) on Jul 27, 2017 at 12:47pm PDT

Friday video: Guinygirlz running together

Since Bérke had to leave the guinygirlz behind, Raani and Cookie have taken up a new hobby of zooming through the cage together.
Whee hope this is a nice start for your weekend!

We have a visitor.

It is far too hot for us to go out and send in reports so we are going to tell you about our visitor.

She is called Torty and she comes to stay with us when her human goes away on holiday. Unlike us, she is safe to be out in the hot weather and she is staying in a little pen on our lawn. Long time readers may have seen her before as she has been coming for many years. She is very old, even older than our Slave. We are somewhat concerned that she is eating OUR veggies but she is very slow and does not seem to need as much food as us piggies plus she does not eat grass so our favourite food is safe.

Here she is again enjoying some tomato. We could eat a whole one in the time it takes her to munch through this little piece but we do not need to worry about a tomato famine as there are lots more ripening in the greenhouse.

We do hope that normal summer weather will return soon as we would like to go out and pick our own grass but Slave takes her shears to work and brings us home lots of good stuff.

A Piggy A-Z. E is for Edvard Munch

Hi!  I'm Edvard Munch, and I live with the Prairie Pigs in Western Canada.  I'm named after a famous Norwegian painter. I'm not very artistic, but I am excellent at munching, so I think that might be why Slave thought that was a good name for a piggy.

Here I am, admiring the most famous painting by that other Edvard Munch, the human one.  It's called The Scream: that's how I feel when the snacks are late!

Speaking of snacks and munching, here I am enjoying my favourite treat: yellow pepper.  Yum!

And here I am with my pal Guinness.  We live next door to each other and share a hay rack.  Guinness is a very calm and thoughtful older piggy who is happy to share his boarly wisdom with me while we are munching away on either side of the hay rack.  His eyes really are that colour!

Now that you've heard from one Prairie Pig, stay tuned for some of my friends who will be reporting in soon when the piggy alphabet project gets to their letter of the alphabet.  Faith and Guinness are already working on their own stories!

In the meantime, are there any other "E" piggies out there?  Esmeralda or Ezekiel possibly?  Check the "Contribute" button at the top of this page --- it's easy and fun to post your own story.  Every piggy deserves their moment in the sun, and who doesn't love looking at pigtures of other people's piggies???