[Gpdd] CARE A Cautionary Tale........

[Cuttlefish Arts]

I'm glad all ended well!

I sometimes use junk office paper and mail as a substrate below the big
tabloid sheets of newsprint. Some piggies will eat their newspaper, alas,
but I make sure to have several layers of "clean" black and white newsprint
on the very top where they can get at it. You can't always tell though -- if
they are determined, they can get to it; I don't currently have any
"diggers" so this works well.

I had a gp who was pretty old, and in retrospect, I realize he drank and
urinated a lot -- as well as playing with his water bottle. This made for a
damp situation -- but with the proper bedding on top of papers, the papers
would suck all the liquid down so that the gps were on dry bedding. Anyway,
I used shredded paper and junk mail below the layers of newspaper, and it
was excellent for absorption. And cheap.

BUT you do have to watch for loose staples! I have started using a stapler
that doesn't use staples and can clip about 5 sheets together by making a
notch in the paper. Very clever! I wish they would come up with an
industrial process to do this. It would also make recycling a lot easier.
---Vic

> 
> ............but with a happy ending.
> 
> A piggy was taken to see my Rodentologists because he was not eating. When
> they inserted the separators to check his teeth, a large amount of hay and
> grass was found to be stuck in his mouth. They carefully picked out all of the
> pieces and one clump appared to be stuck so, assuming that a piece of hay had
> caught somewhere, a harder tug was necessary.
> 
> Checking through the mass of uneaten food that came out, there was a staple!
> Now that they were able to see inside his mouth clearly, it could be seen,
> from the injury caused, that the staple had embedded itself into the little
> piggy's mouth. The staple was closed one end and open the other and the sharp
> end must have stuck into him and although he had tried to eat, he had been
> unable to do so.
> 
> In England, our newspapers are beset with stupid little extra
> sections.....sport, travel, arts etc..... which fall out when the paper is
> opened to line a pen or cage. Most of these only consist of 4 pages so why it
> is felt necessary to staple them together I do not know. I collect all of
> these sections up in a box and de-staple them for use another day. There is
> always a shortage of newspaper at Piggyfriends, despite the wonderful folk who
> leave bags of them on the doorstep otherwise I would recycle the stapled
> pages. Sometimes one stapled section contains yet another nested within ( or
> even two ).
> 
> The little piggy was so lucky that the staple had not gone any further as if
> it had been swallowed he would be unlikely to be alive to tell the tale. His
> mouth was sore but is healing up quickly. His owner was mortified to see what
> had happened to his piggy.
> 
> I saw the piggy yesterday when I visited the Rodentologists and he was happily
> munching hay. He is called Rupert and looks the image of my Peony, who was
> part of that big RSPCA rescue that I wrote about earlier this year. I found
> out that he, too, was part of that rescue and as my Rodentologists have
> several of those rescued piggies themselves, he was amongst "family".
> 
> So, if you use newspapers in your cages and pens and if those papers contain
> staples, think of Rupert and double check that no staples are going into the
> cage. 
> 
> Rupert is well enough to go home today. I love a happy ending.
> 
> Penny and the Piggyfriends.
>