A Series of Fortunate & Unfortunate Events

[CavyMum58]

Due to a series of first fortunate and then unfortunate events, I first brought home a new guinea pig buddy to try to integrate into my tiny herd of two boars. I kept him originally in the same C&C cage, separated by C&C grid partition. After about 2 days, my two bonded boys had a fur ball fight & one ended up with a small cut on his nose. So I then had to separate them. The naughtiest of the two, Mr. Instegator, went into a large box. In the morning after one night's separation to cool down, I cleaned the pen (again) and put him back with his mate. They've been fine ever since.
Then the next day, I decided to see what would happen if I removed the partition. Mr. Instegator and the New Guy chased and humped and squealed and chased and humped some more. The 3rd guy... the one with the nose wound... seemed to completely ignore the other two. He sat in the hay bin eating and sleeping the entire time. Go figure... So after several hours, as the two chasers were quieting down a bit and eating and resting, I decided to remove the partition completely and give it a go. It worked! They stayed together with no fighting, they remained calm and the chasing and humping almost completely stopped.
The moral of the story is... even boars can live in herds if the combination is suitable. Never say Never.
The unfortunate part came later. My wonderful but sometimes very stubborn and controlling spouse insisted I take my foster child, the New Guy, back to the rescue. I had to, to keep the peace. I'm heartbroken, but I will recover. It's not a first. Life isn't always what you want it to be.

 

[Piggies&buns]

I’m sorry to hear you had to have him rehomed.


Yes, a boar herd is sometimes possible (where the space covers at least as many square metres as there are piggies. And herds are certainly possible and particularly where you are dealing with 8-10 or more boars - more piggies=more dispersed tensions) with older boars where testosterone has fizzled out, carer herds, very chilled out piggies who have more sow like personalities etc but the issues mostly occur when young boars are put together and hormones start flying. We tend to see these failures mostly because owners are misadvised by pet shops and breeders. It is more common for it to fail than to work unfortunately.

I think without background and timescale for us and anybody reading this in the future, it would be difficult to say whether it would have worked long term or to be able to advise anybody else to try it safely.
A bonding can appear to go ok in the immediate stages but unless and until they are/were long past the two week bonding period there would be no way to know what was going to happen, and even then with boars groups there is always the chance they fail months sometimes years down the line. You can have one strong character that keeps the others in check and it works until the strong one passes/becomes ill and can’t hold the others off a takeover/another decides they have had enough; all three very chilled etc)

And to add for the sake of anyone else bonding in future - we do not advise partitions are just removed to allow each other to walk into what would have become the territory of others. It’s good it was ok in your case but there are many cases where just removing partitions has caused fights. Bonding should be done by all piggies being removed from their respective cages and being put into a totally neutral space.

 

[CavyMum58]

Thank you for your insights and clarifications... always full of good thoughts. I was simply happy that they did as well as they did. And sorry our new friend had to leave us... would have loved if they had remained together. My two that I still have are 4.5 y/o and the new guy was almost 4 y/o... so much less testosterone than young piggies. And I do have about 28 square feet of space in their pen... which probably helped. Plus plenty of hideys, a couple of hay boxes and food bowls, etc. They didn't have to share much. Anyway.... we'll never know how it may have played out, but for a brief time it was good.