Daily Routine

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GuineaPigLover7891

Junior Guinea Pig
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Hi! I have two boars (Patches and Carmal). Due to this forum, I now know that guinea pigs love routine. I’ve made a sample routine and was wondering if it’s ok. This is just for summer btw. I will be skipping vegetables since they have soft poop.

Morning




8:00- Vegetables
Food
Water
Hay
Spot clean

10:30- Whole Cage clean (Sunday)

Afternoon



12:00- Vegetables

6:00 Lap time + Floor time

9:30- Vegetables
Bedtime
Spot clean

Please tell me what you think!

Thank you in advance!
 
It’s what works for you. Mine is veggies in the morning. If I get home before 7 then I’ll feed them. otherwise it’s breakfast 8-8:30. Dinner is 3:30-4:30 most days, with a second serving of veg and pellets.

Hay is topped up throughout the day as I see fit. Bedding change is also as often as needed. I’ve taken to putting bath mats on top of the fleece for the boys. This seems to give more time between clean outs.

I wouldn’t leave the spot clean till that late though.
 
They are probably having too much veggies if you are feeding 3 times a day and that could explain their soft poops. Food should be 80% hay. Also there is no pellets mentioned in your routine. I feed pellets once a day, in small amounts now as Lily loves pellets and was getting too chunky
 
Mine have a routine during the week when I’m working, but weekends are a bit freeform. Sometimes we’re up at 8, so they come downstairs and have breakfast at 8. Sometime it’s not until 10 or even 11! They don’t seem to mind. Some weekends we’re busy and out a lot, in which case they get zipped into their pen when we’re out the house. Sometimes we’re home all the time and they’re only zipped in at night.
As long as they have hay, fresh water, and some veggies and aren’t too dirty, they don’t care. They don’t even care about the dirt- that’s just me!
 
Lady Kelly said:
They are probably having too much veggies if you are feeding 3 times a day and that could explain their soft poops. Food should be 80% hay. Also there is no pellets mentioned in your routine. I feed pellets once a day, in small amounts now as Lily loves pellets and was getting too chunky
Click to expand...

I give them each a cup of veggies a day. I just split it up into 3 meals.
 
Lady Kelly said:
They are probably having too much veggies if you are feeding 3 times a day and that could explain their soft poops. Food should be 80% hay. Also there is no pellets mentioned in your routine. I feed pellets once a day, in small amounts now as Lily loves pellets and was getting too chunky
Click to expand...

Sorry I must have forgotten to add pellets to the routine! I feed it at 8:00. Going back to the veggies, I don’t give them 1 cup of veggies every veggie time. I split the cup of veggies into 3 meals.
 
I wouldn’t worry too much about it. Following a rigid timetable could lead to you feeling stressed and guilty if you don’t manage to do things exactly on time. Often it’s easier to just go with the flow and find what works for you. As long as they’ve got food, water and hay and are clean they are just happy being guinea pigs and wandering about.
Some days life just gets busy and I don’t manage to get them out for floor time as much as I want and that is fine, I don’t need to feel awful about it
 
Yes a very rigid routine can also be stressful for animals, that's one of the first principles of understanding animal behaviour when caring for any animal in captivity- they can get to expect things exactly on time and get bored in between, and start doing negative stereotyped stress behaviours like bar biting and cage chewing on the days you are a bit late because life gets in the way!
Our strict routine only extends to 2 full cage cleans a week (usually wednesdays and saturdays) when they get 3-4 hours of playpen floor time and all the waterbottles and food dishes and hay trays get scrubbed out and the fleece changed.
Otherwise they get 2 meals a day: breakfast between 6.30 and 8.30am, a very small amount of pellets like half a spoonful, plus a slice of cucumber, each- then a hay top up- and dinner between 6.30 and 8.30pm, again half a spoonful of pellets each and a slice of red pepper plus some sort of salad or coriander leaves- then a hay tray clean and refill and a poop scoop and some extra timothy hay. If we're home early or during the day I chuck in a bit of extra hay and sometimes a small leafy snack about 3-4pm. Weekends they usually get different veg like beansprouts and baby corn, and a bit of carrot or apple.
Routine is good, but only up to a point- it has to work for you too, and not become so fixed the piggies have a nervous breakdown if you go on holiday or are busy and things change occasionally!
 
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