Guinea Pig Gender Check

Baby&Chubs

When you hear the name Baby, you might think that our piggy is female. Well, that’s what we thought at first… After having two female Abyssinians for a while, we decided we wanted to add a third piggy to our herd. Since we didn’t want to risk our guinea pigs getting pregnant, we decided to buy another female.

When my mother and I walked into a pet shop, the guinea pig cage was filled with five little piggies. They were all big and black, except the smallest orange one.  First thing we asked was if they were all male or female guineas. The shop assistant said they were mixed and we told her it wasn't very wise, but we added that we wanted a female one. She started checking the piggies' gender, one by one. The first four turned out to be male and while she was checking the last and the smallest one, my mother yelled "oh, lovely, finally a female!".  The shop assistant just agreed and decided there was no need for further examination with such eager buyers :) At the moment we didn’t think it was a little suspicious that they kept a female among a group of males, because at the very start she said the group was mixed. In retrospect, I realize that the shop assistant simply saw an opportunity to sell a piggy :)

Right away we put our new "baby-girl" together with our other two females and at first there weren’t any problems whatsoever. They seemed to get along quite well. Then, after about two months, we noticed that Baby started acting differently. Since "she" was the smallest piggy, the other two would chase her around from time to time, but all of a sudden Baby started chasing them around and purring relentlessly. It seemed quite funny actually, when you looked at their size difference. We thought that maybe she just got fed up with being chased around and started being more aggressive to assert her dominance, so we didn’t intervene. We would simply watch them and laugh. However,  one evening, we noticed that Baby tried to hump Chubs.

We immediately picked Baby up and turned her over. And indeed, after a several attempts, we managed to see that "she" was actually "he".  Seemed like he had just hit puberty. We promptly separated them, since we didn’t want to sterilize him or risk pregnant guinea pigs. Even though they were now in two different cages, we would let Baby run around their cage every day. It has been like that ever since. They like to sniff one another and he loves looking at them.