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.

Happy Hallowe'en to all our Readers!

Otto Piggyfriend here ( aka Agent Mystery ). On behalf of all the Piggyfriends, I would like to wish you all a happy and safe Hallowe'en. We hope that you all get lots of treats - tricks are not necessary. More treats please Slave!

Spooky Halloween themed Friday video

We tried to find a creepy halloween-themed friday video...
Not sure we succeeded, let us know if you found any better ones;)

Abyssinians & A piggy A-Z: Tijger has abbytude!

Hi,

My name is Tijger (Tiger in Dutch) and I am an Abyssinian, so I fall in the A category. My mum and dad say I have 'Abbytude'. I am not sure what that is but it sounds cool, huh? I guess it means I am usually a very present piggy, curious and interested and I know what I wants.

If there are more abyssinians out there please join in! We need at least two more for the Go fish! game mummy is planning to make. Did she already tell you about this!?

Okay here's the plan:
As many of you know me mum used to gather pigtures and create a calendar of it every year. She wanted to try something else, and she also likes that near the end of the year they could sell the calendars and the profit that was made on this was sent to a guinea pig shelter somewhere in the world. A have never lived in a shelter, but I know my friends Peaches and Berke come from a shelter, and eventhough they were taken good care of in the shelter, they do really enjoy living with me now in their forever home! As many piggies are abandoned, money is always needed for these shelters.
This 'something else' turned into a Go Fish! card game, if you do not know the game, have a look here. We call it Kwartet in dutch (kwart meaning one/fourth), and the goal is to gather the most 'kwartets', which are 4 cards on a certain topic.
Up until now we have gotten a lot of entries for our go fish game, and Mom thinks we are ready to make a game... some quartets (see the Kwartet link above) might not be complete yet. We will let you know soon, if we need more and if you have a nice piggie pigture in one of the catagories needed send them in. Otherwise Auntie Penny (and maybe Stef or Jean) have owned so many piggies, I am sure we can complete the sets with their help.. ;)
We will order the Go fish/Kwartet games once we can make complete sets, and then they can be ordered with my slave. Like with the calendar she will make a form for you to sign up.
Once we have a nice profit I will ask you to nominate shelters and there will be a poll up on the blog to vote on your shelter.

Mum however has no clue how many games to order, so if you already know that you would like one, please comment below. Of course if it turns out you cannot get one in the end that is okay, but it would be nice to have some kind a indication how many people are interested...

We would like to have the games ready and send to their owners before christmas, so keep an eye out for posts about this if you are interested!

Nice to meet you all, I am nearing Agent weight (1 kilogram), so hopefully I can reveal my agent name soon,
Tijger of the Guinygirlz (Roos & Peaches and boar Berke)

A Piggy A-Z - A is for Audrey

This story was sent to us by our reader Pat, Slave to the Prairie Pigs..........

These girls are Audrey ("A" for Audrey) and Doris, both long gone to the Bridge now, but years ago they were my third and fourth guinea pigs ever. Like many animals who have been through hard times together, they were absolutely devoted to each other.

And these two had definitely been through hard times. They ended up at my local SPCA shelter as part of an animal abuse case. Some horrible people had decided to "get rich quick" breeding rabbits in their garage, and things had gotten seriously out of hand. The poor rabbits were in terrible shape by the time the SPCA was alerted by the neighbours and many did not survive, but in the midst of this horror was a tiny cage with two guinea pigs in it. (Apparently, they were intended to be the beginning of a guinea pig breeding operation, but since they were both girls, that part of the "business" was not going well.)

They had to stay at the shelter for several months while the court case proceeded, but afterwards one of the shelter staff who had seen me coming in with donations of hay and pellets decided I would be the perfect pig parent for these two. I had only had my first two piggies, Daphne and Guinevere, less than a year and wasn't really intending to expand, but you couldn't hear Audrey and Doris' story without wanting to make sure the rest of their life was good, so they came home with me.

At first glance, Audrey seemed to be quiet and shy, but I soon realized she was the boss of the pair. When it was floor time, Doris was not allowed to leave the cage until Audrey left, and if Doris got impatient and tried to sneak out ahead, Audrey would herd her back in and make her stand in the corner until she apologized and admitted she had been wrong. Doris was much braver and more outgoing where people were concerned, but Audrey was definitely the talker. She had a distinctive and piercing voice and a very large vocabulary; she was my introduction into the wondrous diversity and creativity of piggy language, and was always the first to sound off if she heard a refrigerator door opening or me getting out of bed in the morning.

That has become one of my favourite things about pig-keeping --- listening to them talking to each other or giving me orders. I think people who have only one or two piggies are really missing out, because they never get to hear all the vocal variations you get with your own little herd.

Friday video: Piggie city dwellers

We liked this video, because it depicts the day in the life of a human, ehm Guinea pig...

A Piggies Reporting - Astrid & Hershey

Hello fellow piggies and piggy-slaves!

I'm Astrid, an Abyssinian, also an A-pig twice over like the gorgeous Angelina!  

This is my baby picture when slaves brought me home from the rescue at just 23 days old.  Aren't I cute? I am much heftier now - that's for sure! 

And these are two of my A-pig friends, lovely Agoutis Jaina & Hershey.  

This is my nanny-pig, Jaina.  She is known in these parts as Agent Peanut and, sadly, she passed away a few weeks ago.  We miss her a lot, but my other agouti friend Hershey keeps me company. Our piggy-dad has a weak spot for agoutis! 

This is me & Hershey celebrating our birthdays last November - I turned 1 and Hershey turned 3.  We look forward to celebrating our 2nd and 4th birthdays coming up in just a few weeks! 

Neither one of us believes in showing off our bellies, no matter how much the slaves beg us, but Hershey has a lovely burnt orange tummy.  It's just too gorgeous for the average viewer to handle, so we'll leave it that and protect you! 

We look forward to seeing other A-pig friends and others through the alphabet.  What a fun game! 

A Piggy A-Z. A for Agouti.

We thought that we would start an A-Z of all things piggy and we want you all to join in.

I am ANGELINA Piggyfriend and I am an AGOUTI  so I am an "A" twice over!

Agoutis come in many colours but we all have a different colour underneath. ( Our Slave likes this pigture as it shows how round I am ). Our coat is ticked whereby the end of the hair is a different colour to the underneath. We look more like the original piggies that came from South America hundreds of years ago.

Do you have a piggy whose name begins with an A or do you have an ABYSSINIAN, an ALPACA or an AGOUTI?  If so, we would love you to contribute a pigture and a little story too if you wish.

Just look for the word Contribute at the top of our page ( under the photo of our esteemed leader ) and follow the instructions. It is so easy and we'd love to see you.

Friday Video: Hamster Jazz Band

Take note egg card, you should have kept with the guinea pig adverts who wants to see dolphins, keep it small and furry!!

Fuzzypeg before and after

When we posted pigtures of Alpacas the other week, Pat and the Prairie Pigs commented about the pigtures of Fuzzypeg before and after, which we shared with the readers of the GPDD at the time.

Some of you reading this now might not have seen these so we thought that we would show them again.

Fuzzypeg came to us from a home where the slave did not know how to care for long haired piggies. He came with Gandalf, whom you will have seen on this blog and he is a Coronet and was not in such bad shape as Fuzzypeg. He just needed a haircut round the back and had his nails clipped

Fuzzypeg's coat was totally matted and full of bits of hay so a lot had to be removed. As Pat said, there was enough taken off to knit a couple of guinea pigs.

Here you can see a whole bagful of surplus hair - as big again as Fuzzypeg himself.

Then he had a shampoo and had his curly nails cut. Here he is drying off.

And here he is enjoying a snack after all that pampering. As you can see he still has some of his curly coat left but minus the mats and tangles.

Moral of this tale is that if you own a long haired piggy, keep up with the hairdressing. Of course, if you are reading this blog, you already know that!

Friday Video; This is a Merino Guinea Pig

Or is it really a cute ball of fluff?



In other news I am now 6 years and 6 months old go me!!

Friday Video: A Bit of Guinea Pig Fun

We love this layout with the hidey holes and play areas!!

Alpaca piggies for our card game

Hello piggies everywhere. We are wondering if there are any Alpaca piggies who would like to join in our project. Maybe a Slave has a pigture of an Alpaca who is reading this from the Rainbow Bridge. An Alpaca is a Rexed Peruvian. ie they have long coats which fall forward over their eyes and the coat is wavy. Our Slave always trims their fringes so that they can see out and we can see their lovely faces.

We will start this off with Piggyfriend Alpacas.

Here are Snickers on the left and her father, Leo. They belonged to Slave's friend and they used to board with us when she went away on holiday. Eventually they came to live with us full time.

 And here is our Fuzzypeg.

Our Slave knows that a member of the GPDD had an Alpaca who looked the image of our Fuzzypeg but she can't remember who he belonged to. She even has his photo in her vast collection of pigtures. If this Slave could get in touch and give her permission, we would love to add this photo.

Friday Video: Fun Treat for Piggies

We have had toilet roll tubes stuffed with hay and they are great fun especially when you hit your cage mates over the head with them **heehee** but we think adding fresh veggies will make them even more fun

Crested piggie

Agent Cookie: Hi, I have a different colour crest. My pals on Twitter call it a pigwig. It's like having a polar cap, except on your head. Cookie x

New Smooth-haired entry

Hi all,

We got this entry on our twitter account @guinygirlz

Meet Piggie Pie as a "Pirate Piggy"!

Crested Piggies

We have had a few Crested Piggies here at Piggyfriends down the years and here are a selection.  Slave calls Crested Piggies " pigs with hats ".

First of all is our dear Gulliver, who grew to be a LAPS member ( Large and Ample Piggy Society ) as you can see in the pigture below. All the good views of him show him looking up at the photographer and this is the only one that we could find showing his crest.

Next you can see Halloween, named because he arrived here on October 31st. and here he is celebrating his special day. He was with us for 8 years, our oldest ever Piggyfriend.

Now you can see Sam enjoying his lunch.

And finally here is Amethyst, who loved to sleep on top of her box.

If any readers have pigtures of their Crested Piggies, please send them in, especially if you have an American Crested. Unlike our Piggyfriends, the American Crested has the crest in a different colour to the rest of the coats. We believe that these piggies have a white crest. The American Crested looks even more like they are wearing hats as the crest shows up so well against the rest of the coat.

If we get enough pigtures of both ordinary cresteds plus American cresteds we might be able to make up a set of both.

Watch out for our next set coming soon..............

Friday Video: Making the Piggy House

We are not actually sure what the title of this video is as it may be in German however we love the end result, enjoy!!

Book Review; Guinea Pig Pride and Prejudice

Last week we were contacted by Bloomsbury publishing to see if we would like to receive a copy of Guinea Pig Pride and Prejudice a new book they are launching we asked Mummy and she got all excited and said yes.

On Saturday the book arrived in the post as you can see from the pigtures below it was beautifully wrapped just like a present (we think it would make a great gift for piggy loving humans)

At bedtime mummy read the story to us its about piggies falling in love despite not liking each other at first.

Mummy loved the cute pigtures especially the cast list and we really liked the smart costumes (you can see some of our favourite shots below)

What we also liked was the message at the back of the book about supporting local shelters well that has our full backing and we are glad to see them get a mention as lots of humans have no idea the piggy rescues exist.

Now enjoy the pigtures and start planning which of your humans has been good enough to get a copy.

abscesses v. sebaceous cysts

Hello everyone, Otto Piggyfriend here.

First of all a warning. Mieke has added a photo of her late piggy, Toby, to this post. Poor little piggy had a nasty abscess and you can see him after it had been lanced. It looks nasty but it might be useful to see how it looks.

You'll remember recently reading the post about Agent F1 aka Jim's sebaceous cyst. It was on August 3rd. Well, at the very same time I had one too. Mine was on my back and Slave might not have noticed it under all my long hair ( in this pigture I have had a haircut but I usually look like a mop ) but the cyst appeared right in the middle of my parting. Like Jim, I had it attended to by an expert - in my case our Rodentologist.

Slave didn't take any photos of this as she forgot to take her camera along but if you look back at Jim's post, you'll see what it looked like. Our Rodentologist shaved off my coat around the cyst, made an incision in it and then squeezed out all the nasty looking contents. He says that piggy skin is like leather! Our Slave can do this herself but what she cannot do is remove the gland underneath. Without this, there is a chance that the cyst will come back. She watched very carefully as he cleaned the area up and then picked out the gland with a pair of tweezers. I was busy watching the squirrels racing up and down the tree outside our Rodentologist's home so I missed it all and never squealed once. After he had removed the gland, he packed the hole where the cyst had been with Dermisol cream ( this is antiseptic ) and I was given lots of parsley to eat, after which we came home. Slave kept an eye on it but it healed up very quickly and now there is nothing to be seen.

These cysts can appear in different places. Our Petunia once had one underneath near her leg.

An abscess is a much more serious matter. This contains a lot of nasty pus, which is toxic, smells horrible and needs careful removal. Rather than just a small lump, which gets bigger slowly, an abscess can come up overnight and can be huge. They are often around the neck area and, because of their position can cause a piggy trouble when trying to eat. Our Rodentologist lances them when they are ready, being very careful of the contents and usually keeps the piggy patient in the hospital until they are better as, although the pus has been removed, more keeps being produced and it fills up again. Constant draining is needed. Some vets will remove the encapsulated abscess under anaesthetic but our Rodentologist does not want to subject a piggy to anaesthesia unless absolutely necessary as it is so dangerous for us. Sometimes a drain is inserted to keep the hole open so more pus can come out or else the abscess can be lanced again as often as is necessary. It can take a long time for an abscess to clear up completely and sometimes there can be a second one behind the first and maybe a third in a chain.

We may need a lot of syringe feeding during this time until we can eat by ourselves again.

Sometimes piggies can get tooth root abscesses and these are very dangerous and hard to treat.

Toby (one of Mieke's late piggies) had an abscess in his cheek,
it might have been in this tooth root, it was very close at least.

Our Rodentologist does not give antibiotics as an abscess is separate from the rest of the body. The word comes from the Latin meaning that it is walled off.

If any of our readers have had experiences regarding cysts or abscesses, they might like to post about it. It is useful to share information and various treatments.

Rex piggies at Piggyfriends

We have been trawling the archives for pigtures of our Rex piggies past and present and would like to present a selection. Our Slave takes hundreds of pigtures and it has been a mammoth task to pick just a few of our friends.

Here are brothers Raffles and Rolo. When he got older Raffles' hair grew a bit longer so there may have been some Texel in their ancestry.

Next is our Daisy, who was a typical Rex and grew to be a large lady and was President of the LAPS club on the GPDD ( Large Ample Piggies Society ). She weighed over 3lbs in her prime. She also had a crest so qualifies in both sections.

Then we have Mayflower, one of four sisters born to rescued Ginger but the only one to have a Rex coat.

Here are sisters Crystal and Toffee.

And Polo ( Agent Minty ) demonstrating his allegiance to Slave's flag on St. Patrick's Day.

We can't leave out our dear Roscoe, Daisy's brother. Here he is sharing his 5th. birthday feast on the lawn with his best friend, Shadow.

And lastly, our two fat ladies, Agents 88, Sally and Susie, who are sisters.

These are not the only Rexes who have found their way to Piggyfriends but we don't want to monopolise the blog. Now, dear readers, please send us your pigtures of your Rex or US Teddy piggies. We want to see them all.

Another smooth coated piggy

Agent Confetti here.  I'm late to the party, but if I count as a smooth-haired gp (I am also a crested), here is my photo.  As always, I am at your service.