[Gpdd] [ANNOUNCEMENT] Introducing my piggies

[scalabro3 at cfl.rr.com]

Hi. I’ve been reading your posts for a year now, and I thought it was time to introduce our herd.  We rescued Dillon and Donovan from the local humane society in June 2008. We’d never had guinea pigs before, and they have been a wonderful addition to our family.  

Dillon is a grey and white American short hair and his brother Donovan is an orange and white Abyssinian.  Both of my “big boys” weigh more than 3 pounds, though Dillon is having some health problems that I will post more on later. 

In May 2009, while buying Oxbow hay at our local pet store, we found our little Puffball (aka Puffy). He was the tiniest little thing, and we thought we’d lose him the first night because he wouldn’t eat and he just shivered in the corner of his cage.    Fortunately, that didn’t last long, and he’s turned out to be our most outgoing boy.  Like Donovan, Puffy is an orange and white Abyssinian, but he must have some Peruvian in him because his “tail” fur just grows and grows.  We think he’s about six months old now.

Everyone seemed happy, except Puffy was in a cage by himself because he didn’t get along with the “Big Boys”, so we found him a friend. In August, we rescued Cocoa Puff from a “second chance” rescue in Orlando. He’s a “special needs” pig.  He’s a brown and white Abyssinian with a permanent head tilt and chronic eye problems. We were told that he had Waltzing’s disease and that he was deaf and didn’t vocalize, but our cavy-savvy vet believes that he had a severe ear infection when he was a youngster (he’s eight months old now) and that it wasn’t Waltzing’s disease. He’s turned into a very vocal piggie, he’s just l little quieter than the others.  He and Puffy are great friends. We worried about putting him with Cocoa because Puffy was such a bully to the big boys, but he’s so sweet with Cocoa. He grooms him and sits outside Cocoa’s pigloo even though he has his own.  

Well, that’s our herd. Thanks for all the information that you’ve shared with me over the last year, I’ve really learned a lot!

ME – New Smyrna Beach, Florida