The last of the taste tests.

We have come to the last of the taste test " treats". This one is called "Fruit Garden" and it contains Apple, Banana and Rosehip. Now we did not expect this to go down too well as none of us like banana. Slave can only remember five Piggyfriends ever liking banana in the very many years that she has been taking in piggies.

Tyrion filled the dish ready for us to try. Here is a photo of it. The dark bits that you can see must be dried rosehips. We are not sure why they are there but fresh rosehips do contain vitamin C, which we get from the many fresh veggies that we eat.

Unsurprisingly Carter dived into the bowl. He chucked out all the banana and tried a few apple pieces.

Saoirse joined him, sniffed at the dish and left.

The Dangermice were undecided about this. Cosmo nibbled a little bit of the apple.....

......but Casper retreated into his pig cave and would have nothing to do with it.

This is as close as Fernando would get to the dish and Martin ran away.

" No thank you." says Otto as Slave tried to tempt him with some of the dried apple.

As no pig was enjoying this box of treats, Slave took pity on us and went and picked some apples from the garden. Here is Louis munching a piece of real fresh apple. "Yum yum".

We all want to thank Nature's Feast for sending us all this food to try out and we are sorry that we did not like the Treats but the bag of food was good. We think that the treat boxes may be more suited to hamsters. We are going to email Nature's Feast and tell them about our test in case they are not reading our blog.

Tyrion, Ivan and Magnus all say " This is the food that we love the best. GRASS!"

Trying out the treats continued.......

Next we tried the "Vegetable Patch" box. This contained dried carrot, parsnip and flaked peas. We all love flaked peas, which our Slave buys loose from the pet shop and sprinkles on our dishes of nibble.

As we were filling the dish, Slave noticed a sunflower seed in the mix and quickly whisked it out. It is said that seeds present a choking hazard for piggies. We never have them but better safe than sorry.

Louis tried it first as carrots are his absolute favourite veggie. You can see in this pigture how it looked from the start.

He ate some of the carrot flakes and started on the flaked peas. As we all wanted to try this treat, we moved the dish on to the next pen where Fernando had a few pieces but his brother, Martin, was not interested.

Next we gave the dish to Carter, Aoife and Saoirse.

Needless to say, Carter rushed over and had some of this treat and Aoife joined him. Carter says to please forgive the state of their pen but the housekeeper has not been round yet.

Some of us are not fond of carrot so not all the Piggyfriends joined in this taste test but Casper Dangermouse ( below ) had some.

Magnus was not sure about this although he likes carrots and his brother Ivan would not try it so he  is not in this pigture. ( below ).

By the time the dish had gone the rounds, not surprisingly all the flaked peas had gone. No pig wanted to eat the dried parsnip, which was very hard and we never eat parsnip anyway. We could not see the point in having dried carrot and much prefer having a nice fresh carrot pulled from Slave's vegetable garden.

All in all, this "treat" was better than the "Flower Garden" one but we would rather just have our usual flaked peas and fresh carrot.

We might give this 3 stars as some piggies, who are not so fortunate as to have a never ending supply of fresh carrots might like it.

The last treat box is called  "Fruit Garden" and we will be testing this soon so look out for our post.

Testing the new food......continued.

We have heard from a Slave on the GPDD called Chris, who has been trying out the new food and her four girls love it.

Today we have been trying out the "Nature's Feast Snack Selection", which has three different contents. First of all we opened the box called "Flower Garden". The next photo shows you what it looks like.

This is a mix of dried flowers, namely Marigold, Rose, Cornflower and Sunflower. Now, we eat flowers in our daily forage but Slave picks Vetch in season and that is our favourite. We also like Dandelion and Sow Thistle flowers but we always have them fresh. The instructions on the packet are to give out one teaspoon of snack per day but, as there are a lot of us, we decided to pass the dish around from pen to pen.

Now Carter will have a go at any new food and he rushed over to see what was in the dish. He sniffed at it and retreated. His girls did not get any nearer than you can see in this photo.

Fernando also came over to have a look. He did pick up a couple of flowers but dropped them back into the dish and went back to his cucumber.

The instructions on the packet suggest " Hand feeding snacks helps you bond with your pet." Now we could not be more bonded with our Slave but even this could not tempt us to eat these flowers.

"Sorry, Slave." says Niamh. " Even hand feeding will not tempt me to eat this. I am going to hide in this house."

" No thanks," says Otto, " but if you have any Vetch, that would go down a treat."

No pig was interested in this box but the label does say that it is for Rabbits and Hamsters too so maybe they would enjoy it. Sorry but we can't give this any stars. Tomorrow we are going to try another box and that may be more to our liking.

Slave tipped the dried flowers onto her basket of pot pourri.

Raani's eye, a follow up post on eye injuries...

As you know, I posted about eyes a little while ago. It feels like I jinxed it, because just as I posted that, I picked up Raani and her eye was white blueish... Looked like she had something in her eye that damaged it, but as far as I know the blue white color meant it was healing. Of course that meant we had to see our vet and I had to make this follow up post... Since (unfortunately) Raani had so obligingly agreed to demonstrate eye injuries for us ...

Raani eye damage at the vet 

 So, we went to the vet with Raani. I found out about it Wednesday, but it did not look like anything was left in her eye and the vet was really busy. So we had an early morning appointment on Thursday, because we had a wedding in the afternoon where Erwin was best man and I was the person who makes everything go well that day (sort of like a wedding planner). Turned out there was still a bit of hay in her eye (poor girl!)! Our vet tried to get it out, but (of course) it was painful so she tried to sedate the eye with an eye drop. That didn't work and Raani would try to jump up (even though Erwin was pinning her to the table), so the vet obviously did not want to put a pincer near her eye to get the culprit out. So the vet suggested she would give her a bit of gas narcosis to get the thing out safely. So Raani had to stay there. We also took Binky along so he could get used to a trip to the vet, so Binky stayed with her as well. Poor Cookie hates being alone but 3 piggies in a cat carrier seemed a bit much, even if it was for only half an hour. We were optimistic when we went to the vet... 
The vet was also really busy and had a cat that was not doing well at all who needed her attention, so we were getting a bit anxious, because we could not say to the bride and groom that we would be there later... our roles were pretty essential.

Luckily all went well and we could pick up Raani and Binky in time for the wedding. 

 

This was stuck on top of Raani's eye. It was about 7,5 millimeter or 3/4 of a centimetre long.

This is how her eye looked after just a few days of applying the eye salve pictured below. Looks good, huh? I am always amazed at how well piggy eyes heal!

On the package it says it is an antibiotic eye salve with added vitamin A. We had to put a drop of it on her eye 2 to 3 times a day for at least 5 days.

I am glad Raani's eye is looking good again, and hope she or any of my other piggies will not be so willing to demonstrate an injury or ailment again when we write about another in our piggy A-Z.
Mikey, slave to the guinygirlz Raani and Cookie and boar Binky.

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