Bedding for your guinea pigs

When setting up your cage or environment for your pigs you will face one of your fist dilemmas. The best bedding arrangement.

Baby&Chubs

At first we kept our piggies in a little blow up pool so they didn’t have any bedding at all. That turned out to be a problem fairly quickly.

When we moved them to a cage, we started using wood shavings. However, they would scratch themselves fairly often. As it turned out, little pieces of wood would get stuck in their fur and that would also cause little wounds.

So we decided to use something that had no way of hurting or irritating them, and that was hay. And at first it seemed a pretty good idea. Until we realized that we would have to change it way too often if we didn’t want it to stink. Also it would stay wet and that was dangerous since guinea pigs are very sensitive to cold.

Since we had some old clothes that we hadn’t thrown away, but couldn’t donate, we decide to use it as bedding. We would also add hay on top, of course. It absorbed much better and there would be no stench for a longer period of time. And that seemed like a good idea, until we ran out of old clothes. So we had to move on to something different.

Now we tried putting cardboard underneath the hay. It was definitely better then just hay, but not better then hay with clothes under, since it would start to stink much faster. So we had to try something new yet again.

We decided to try out disposable diapers. And, finally, we found our winner! It was the perfect solution since it would absorb everything efficiently. Our piggies wouldn’t be cold or wet and we didn’t have to change the bedding as often. We just had to make sure that there was enough hay on top of the diapers so that the pigs wouldn’t try to eat them.