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.

Go Fish! Card Game: 11 sets of guinea pigs

Hi all,

As mentioned before we are planning to have a game with pigtures of all our lovely guinea pigs for sale, instead of the Calendar we have done before.
Mieke just recently received the try-out print of our card game, and she is thrilled to show it to you!

Here you can see all 11 sets of Guinea Pigs. The categories are:
Smooth-hairs, (Indiana) Smoothhairs, Smoothhair Piggyfriend,
Smoothhair Guinygirlz, Smooth-haired Agents, White Smoothhairs,
Rex or US Teddy, Rexes or US Teddies, Flower Rexes and Teddies,
Crested piggies, Abbies & Alpacas

Spooky, our late spokespig of the piggypals,
can be admired on the back of the cards

As we did before we want to sell as many of these sets as possible, and all the 'profit' that is made will be donated to a guinea pig shelter somewhere in the world. You can nominate shelters and vote for your favorite as usual.

So if you are interested, you can sign up now!

We hope to be able to sell them at a price of 12,50-15 euros plus costs for shipping form our home in the Netherlands. The game includes a full colour card game with 11 sets of 4 guinea pigs. The card are nice and firm and a normal card game card size. You also get a box to put the game in with the logo of the printer (Gozi) on it, unless we get to order 50 or more sets at once then we can have Spooky on the box...

The size of the cardgame allows Mieke to send the games in an envelope, so costs should be around 5- 6 euro to the US, UK, around 3 euros for neighbouring countries like Belgium and Germany.

As Mieke hasn't given you the exact price of the game yet (depends on how many orders we get), you can sign up conditionally. If the eventual price is too high, let us know and you will not be bound to taking the order. You can find the sign up form here

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

Friday video: Guinea pigs about pumpkin spice and smell-o-vision

Hi all,

Slave hasn't managed to figure our how to embed this video, so you could watch it right from this post, but she does want to share it.
We hope the video loads for you, as it does not seem to load for auntie M...

Enjoy,
Guinygirlz and boar Berke

See the video here:
http://www.hlntv.com/shows/fluff/articles/2015/10/30/fluff-episode-1-guinea-pigs-and-pumpkin-spice

p.s. It starts with a commercial, so wait for the piggies...

Belated Halloween Pigture

We were supposed to give you a building work update today but Mummy saw this yesterday when she went for lunchtime walk and we had to share it.

Mummy says for an idea of how big this really is if you look closely at the pigture you can see it's 4 courses of bricks tall.

What we want to know is who got to eat all the yummy middle bits, we don't care what happened to the nasty pips although Mummy has been known to eat them.

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.