Bonded?

[superka]

So I have caramilk and cookie. been together for about 6 months now i'd say. They're "bonded". as in they live in the same cage fine enough with out trying to kill each other. but getting along would be a bit of a stretch. they seem to just stay on opposite sides of the cage from each other. caramilk rumble struts like crazy any time cookie is somewhere she wants to be until she moves. is this normal bonding? they do seem to tolerate each other well enough for it to count as company. theirs no real fighting to separate them, I ordered an even bigger cage then the one i built (5x2 C&C cage). so if they really dont wanna interact they dont have to. also give them more room to run around more. my main concern is cookie doesn't seem to use hides as much because any time she's in one caramilk wants it and rumble struts around it till she moves..... now she just lays around the cage mostly... caramilk was found living in a bush abandoned outside so I'm wondering maybe her behavior a hold over from having to fight with squirrels and such outside?

 

[Piggies&buns]

Bonding takes two weeks so the fact they have been together for six months without incident suggests they are indeed bonded. Rumbling is a normal piggy behaviour and not wanting to be close is also normal.
Ensure all hides have two exits and that you have multiple hides

 

[superka]

Bonding takes two weeks so the fact they have been together for six months without incident suggests they are indeed bonded. Rumbling is a normal piggy behaviour and not wanting to be close is also normal.
Ensure all hides have two exits and that you have multiple hides

yeah i got a normal round hide i cut a second hole into the back end and a big wooden hide the full width of the cage. its open on the inside but two defined areas inside with each having 2 entrances each. door and window larges enough to go out from. as long as thats normal behavior. i feel bad for cookie some times cause she's super timid. she's soo nice too giving me licks when ever i give her chin rubs. at the same time ive seen a piece of hay touching her spook her and have her wheeking in distress.... very much a drama queen at times. unless its the small dust pan i used to sweep up their poops. she REALLY hates that thing. actively attacks it and everything. i actually need to watch my hands holding it.... only time i've seen her show ANY aggression. guinea pigs have some weird personalities i guess .

 

[Wiebke]

Hi and welcome

Caramilk has clearly got some social issues due to her background even though your sows are bonded. The problem is more whether it is verging on bullying or not. Your girls are now teenagers in terms of development.
Learn more about behaviours and dominance:
Sows: Behaviour and female health problems (including ovarian cysts) (See especially the chapter about behaviour)
A - Z of Guinea Pig Behaviours (dominance)

Measures you can take:
- Consider getting children's stool to use as hideys. They still provide cover but are totally open and cannot be controlled like your current hut. At the extreme with very dominant over-controlling piggies, just a sheet over a large part of the cage and no huts can do the trick.
- sprinkle feed veg and pellets around the cage to minimise food hogging. Keep in mind that we just recommend 1 tablespoon of pellets per piggy per day and ca. 50g/one small bowl of preferably green veg per piggy since these two food groups together replace the supplementary role of wild forage (not more than a quarter of the daily food intake). The more hay your piggies eat, the better for their health and a longer life. Sprinkle-feeding triggers their foraging instincts and counts as enrichment.
Make sure that you have access to hay that cannot be blocked and have hay and water bottles in different places in the cage.
Here is more information on a good diet, which can make around 1-2 years' difference in a piggy life span: Long Term Balanced General And Special Needs Guinea Pig Diets
Use other enrichment ideas to distract Caramilk: Enrichment Ideas for Guinea Pigs

When moving your piggies to a larger cage, you want to minimise a new bout of strong dominance as much as possible:
Please use bedding that has been short use by your girls, so it is scent-marked. Wipe all over the new cage and any new furnishings. Spread the bedding in the middle or if it is more than one piece, in different parts of the cage or let your girls have a romp through the new larger bedding in the old cage for a day.
Guinea pig groups are highly territorial and react to any changes in personnel or premises with a renewal of the the hierarchy that is at the bottom of ever group.

Working out whether you are dealing with a case of bullying or not:
Please weigh your girls once weekly on your kitchen scales (part of normal life-long health monitoring) but check for potential weight loss or a noticeably reduced weight gain compared to the dominant companion in younger piggies.
Weight - Monitoring and Management

For working out whether Cookie is feeling bullied and unhappy or whether the bond is still dysfunctional after tour improvements, please read the information and follow the practical advice in these links here:
Moody Guinea Pigs: Depression, Bullying, Aggression, Stress, Fear and Antisocial Behaviour
Bonds In Trouble
If Cookie turns out to be much happier on her own, please consider inserting a divider into your new cage and keep them as a bonded pair with interaction through the bars but their own territory. This solution is more common for fallen-out 'can't live together and can't live apart' teenage boars but it does work for sows, too.

What you can do for Cookie:
Cookie is very timid and likely rather stressed (i.e. having raised instincts) so please take the time to learn about prey animal instincts in guinea pigs and how to best avoid triggering them. Tell her that she belongs in your herd and is much loved in her own language.
Understanding Prey Animal Instincts, Guinea Pig Whispering and Cuddling Tips
How To Pick Up And Weigh Your Guinea Pigs Safely
Arrival in a home from the perspective of pet shop guinea pigs

All the very helpful and practical links above are part of our much larger information resource. They contain all the little how-to details and background information that we cannot write out in every single post. You may want to bookmark the link, browse, read and re-read at need as you can take different things from a guide at different levels of experience: Comprehensive Owners' Practical and Supportive Information Collection

I hope that this will help you to work out what is going on and give you options if things are not going quite to plan. Your piggies are what they are and have been made by humans, our job as loving owners is to find what works best for them within our own means.

 

[superka]

Hi and welcome

Caramilk has clearly got some social issues due to her background even though your sows are bonded. The problem is more whether it is verging on bullying or not. Your girls are now teenagers in terms of development.
Learn more about behaviours and dominance:
Sows: Behaviour and female health problems (including ovarian cysts) (See especially the chapter about behaviour)
A - Z of Guinea Pig Behaviours (dominance)

Measures you can take:
- Consider getting children's stool to use as hideys. They still provide cover but are totally open and cannot be controlled like your current hut. At the extreme with very dominant over-controlling piggies, just a sheet over a large part of the cage and no huts can do the trick.
- sprinkle feed veg and pellets around the cage to minimise food hogging. Keep in mind that we just recommend 1 tablespoon of pellets per piggy per day and ca. 50g/one small bowl of preferably green veg per piggy since these two food groups together replace the supplementary role of wild forage (not more than a quarter of the daily food intake). The more hay your piggies eat, the better for their health and a longer life. Sprinkle-feeding triggers their foraging instincts and counts as enrichment.
Make sure that you have access to hay that cannot be blocked and have hay and water bottles in different places in the cage.
Here is more information on a good diet, which can make around 1-2 years' difference in a piggy life span: Long Term Balanced General And Special Needs Guinea Pig Diets
Use other enrichment ideas to distract Caramilk: Enrichment Ideas for Guinea Pigs

When moving your piggies to a larger cage, you want to minimise a new bout of strong dominance as much as possible:
Please use bedding that has been short use by your girls, so it is scent-marked. Wipe all over the new cage and any new furnishings. Spread the bedding in the middle or if it is more than one piece, in different parts of the cage or let your girls have a romp through the new larger bedding in the old cage for a day.
Guinea pig groups are highly territorial and react to any changes in personnel or premises with a renewal of the the hierarchy that is at the bottom of ever group.

Working out whether you are dealing with a case of bullying or not:
Please weigh your girls once weekly on your kitchen scales (part of normal life-long health monitoring) but check for potential weight loss or a noticeably reduced weight gain compared to the dominant companion in younger piggies.
Weight - Monitoring and Management

For working out whether Cookie is feeling bullied and unhappy or whether the bond is still dysfunctional after tour improvements, please read the information and follow the practical advice in these links here:
Moody Guinea Pigs: Depression, Bullying, Aggression, Stress, Fear and Antisocial Behaviour
Bonds In Trouble
If Cookie turns out to be much happier on her own, please consider inserting a divider into your new cage and keep them as a bonded pair with interaction through the bars but their own territory. This solution is more common for fallen-out 'can't live together and can't live apart' teenage boars but it does work for sows, too.

What you can do for Cookie:
Cookie is very timid and likely rather stressed (i.e. having raised instincts) so please take the time to learn about prey animal instincts in guinea pigs and how to best avoid triggering them. Tell her that she belongs in your herd and is much loved in her own language.
Understanding Prey Animal Instincts, Guinea Pig Whispering and Cuddling Tips
How To Pick Up And Weigh Your Guinea Pigs Safely
Arrival in a home from the perspective of pet shop guinea pigs

All the very helpful and practical links above are part of our much larger information resource. They contain all the little how-to details and background information that we cannot write out in every single post. You may want to bookmark the link, browse, read and re-read at need as you can take different things from a guide at different levels of experience: Comprehensive Owners' Practical and Supportive Information Collection

I hope that this will help you to work out what is going on and give you options if things are not going quite to plan. Your piggies are what they are and have been made by humans, our job as loving owners is to find what works best for them within our own means.

i'm gonna try my best to get caramilk to be a better cage mate <3. so far they seem ok with each other in the same space for the most part just not Near each other.... with the bigger cage i might just mirror each side. so feeders on both ends, hides ect. i think this will have the effect of them being able to choose which side they want as their side. i also wont have to divide them from each other. my first instinct was cage size because the bush caramilk lived in was about the size of my living room. so even a huge cage by our standards is still small for what she had outside. she also stayed in that cage they're in for a couple of months before i got cookie so she's definitely the "invader". I'm gonna get reading your links, let you know if i got any questions.

 

[Wiebke]

All the best! My guides will hopefully give you the instrumentarium to help you assess their bond. Just based on your perceptions and descriptions, we can't.

Not every bond is a 'cosy' one.

 

[superka]

All the best! My guides will hopefully give you the instrumentarium to help you assess their bond. Just based on your perceptions and descriptions, we can't.

Not every bond is a 'cosy' one.

So the pushing her snout up and looking at her and ear fondling with head pats before and after has REALLY done wonders! she's getting the message still some rumbles, but that's normal. not "hey what are you doing? i want that, move" all the time. Thanks for the service this form provides improving guinea pig lives around the world

 

[Wiebke]

So the pushing her snout up and looking at her and ear fondling with head pats before and after has REALLY done wonders! she's getting the message still some rumbles, but that's normal. not "hey what are you doing? i want that, move" all the time. Thanks for the service this form provides improving guinea pig lives around the world

I did get quite a lot of ridicule in the early years for my 'piggy whispering' tips, but as they mirror how my most socially savvy 'husboar' Terfel (2010-15) dealt with his feisty cataract wives seemingly effortlessly, they do really work.

The more we can understand where piggies are coming from and solve issues within their own social framework, the better and the easier.

You can find more information on guinea pig behaviours and on guinea pigs as a species in the relevant chapters in our information collection link at the end of my last post if you are interested. Guinea pigs are much more complex socially than anybody would expect.
Comprehensive Owners' Practical and Supportive Information Collection

I am currently writing an article series about identity and the multi-layered cavy society for Guinea Pig Magazine; it's called The Herd, the Group and if you are interested in learning more about what makes guinea pigs tick:
#63: Social Identity
#64: Herd Behaviours
#65: The Group and I
#66: The Family and I
#67: We and our Neighbours (currently out)
#68: We, the Boars (in preparation, out May)
#69: Working with Social Cavy Instincts (in preparation, out July)
Magazine website for subscriptions (either in print or as a download world-wide): Home

 

[superka]

while the application may look silly as the old expression goes "if it looks stupid, but works. it ain't stupid." if you're a fisherman they tell you to think like a fish. if you're a hunter think like a deer. if you're an exterminator think like a mouse.... But if you wanna think like a guinea pig? "you're just ridiculous. get your head checked m8 before you end up in the loony bin...." way i see it, at some point in history some random hunter started telling people to rub deer pee on them selves and dress up like a bush... who was that? the guy that kept his family well fed, because they all do it now.... I say even if you're wrong by chance you're on point enough to test it out for my self.

fyi day after doing it, not only has caramilk chilled out a lot but cookie seems more active with out caramilk having a hissy fit. they still chatter at each other when one uses the other ones favorite water bottle or food hole tho. I dont think thats ever going away tho so not gonna worry about it.