[Gpdd] RESCUE. The story of Ginger, a good mother.

[Penny Charlesworth]

It's snowing outside, I can't work today, so I finally have the time to post another story about the Piggyfriends.

In April 2003 I had a call to say that a friend of a friend, who worked in a hospital in a nearby town, had a colleague who was returning to live in her native Portugal and needed someone to take her guinea pigs, who, for reasons unknown, could not be taken home with her.

My Portuguese is limited to ordering a coffee in a restaurant but the piggy's owner spoke a little English and we got by. I was taken round to the back of the house, the garden of which sloped downhill, leaving a gap under the house in which I saw a small open hutch. Where were the piggies? I understood that they lived free-range in the garden, which surprised me as there was no fence at the bottom, where the garden opened out onto a road.

Gradually the story unfolded. This lady had owned what she thought were two sows for 5 years, when one of them had given birth to two babes! The sow and her babes were somewhere in the garden but the boar had run away ( no surprise there then ). We searched for them and eventually found the sow and her youngsters in a flower bed. It seemed that they were expected to make their way home to their hutch when they wanted to. I picked up the sow and a quick examination told me that this little lady was pregnant again. I was unable to ascertain when the boar had made his escape.


Most of you will know that a sow can conceive again within a few hours of giving birth also that she should not have her first pregnancy after she is 10 months old. Please bear with me, you experts, this is for the benefit of the new piggy owners amongst us! A "back to back" pregnancy is not a good idea as the mother needs time to get over the first pregnancy and to be carrying another litter whilst caring for the first is not in her or her babes best interests.

I brought the little family home, having asked the owner to call me if the boar, called Lady Kay, was found before she returned home. They had to be treated for lice. The mum, called Ginger by her owner, had done amazingly well to give birth at her age, without any help or special feeding and I wondered how advanced her pregnancy was. In the little time that there was left, I gave her lots of extra food and hoped for the best.

On the morning of May 1st. I went into their room and saw the young ones, both sows, running anxiously around their pen and when I looked into their sleeping box, Ginger was cleaning up two more babes. They were tiny little runts, very wobbly and with curly coats. Ginger was a part Abyssinian as were her two other babes but I never found out what Lady Kay looked like. I didn't expect them to survive. 

Poor Ginger, unsurprisingly after her ordeal, had very little milk and I had to hand rear her babes. They were both white, one with ginger patches round her eyes and the other looked as though her head had been dipped in chocolate. The latter had one eye that wouldn't open and I suspected micropthalmia, as I had another piggy, Topaz, who was like this. Despite being unable to feed them, Ginger undertook all the other duties of a new mum. Once they had been fed, she would clean them up, keep them warm, let them suckle, although there was no milk there and show them how to be guinea pigs. Their elder sisters helped to keep them warm too.

After a week of bathing the little one's eye, it opened spontaneously and I was surprised to see a perfectly good eye!
The little family continued to grow and thrive and both those little "runts" have grown into big, plump adults. The one with ginger patches I named Gingerbread and the chocolate dipped one is Mayflower as they were born on May 1st.

I was sorry to have no further contact with their owner and always hoped that someone found Lady Kay and gave him a new home.

There. For those of you who don't like my stories broken up into episodes, I've managed to shorten this one to one post and hope that it is not too long for the Moderators.

Penny and the Piggyfriends.