Not all commercial products are healthy. Pellets in general are not needed in their diet at all. Personally my piggies are virtually pellet free. They each get just five pellets and are only given then twice a week as a treat. Their diet is purely hay and grass based with one cup of veggies each day.
Ok so piggies do not get constipated.
A piggy who is not eating won’t poop (simply without food going in, there is nothing to come out) and this is why not eating is a serious issue. Piggies need fibre going through their system constantly otherwise they go into stasis. That requires emergency care, the medication cisapride that you were given and urgent round the clock syringe feeding.
This is not constipation - this is the gut shutting down and can be fatal if their gut stops working altogether.
It is essential that you weigh your guinea pigs every week as part of routine care but you switch to daily weight checks when there are health concerns.
The weight checks are the only way to know a piggy is eating hay but also getting syringe feeding during an illness to keep their weight stable. You never want a piggy to lose weight as that means they aren’t eating enough and at just 50g of weight loss, they need help.
Yes, Emeraid is a recovery feed just the same as critical care. Using their normal pellets and mushing them up to use as a syringe feed is the emergency alternative.
There is another issue which can affect some older boys called impaction. This is where they lose muscle strength and are unable to empty poops out their anal sac. They require help with this and older boys may need to be cleared out regularly to stop it becoming a serious issue. By far it does not affect all though.
A piggy with a good hay based diet, a small amount of a variety of and a few pellets absolutely will be getting enough vitamin c. Additional vit c supplementation should never be given as routine unless there is a diagnosed vit c deficiency (scurvy) is actually rather rare. Supplementing unnecessarily can actually cause problems as their bodies get used to abnormally high amounts. We tend to only see one or two cases of scurvy on here each year and even then they tend to be in either cases of neglect in rescue piggies or in piggies who have been supplemented unnecessarily (as I say their bodies get used to abnormally high amounts and then if that level drops from which they have become accustomed to, it responds with scurvy symptoms)
I have added some guides in below which explain more about the issues raised in this thread
Please always have your boar vet checked promptly when you suspect impaction!
- What you think is impaction may actually not be the thing in the first place!
- Impaction can also not the be main cause/problem but a complication resulting from another health problem, which may go unnoticed until it could be too late (problems in the penis shaft, bladder stones, hernias or internal abscesses or tumors).
- Long time unnoticed impaction can cause infection, which need antibiotic treatment.
The following videos have some graphic scenes depicting Impaction.
How...
1 Weight and Weight Loss
- Why regular weight monitoring matters
- How weight changes over a lifetime
- How to weigh on your kitchen scales (with video)
- The weight loss rules
- How critical is the weight loss for my piggy?
- Possible causes for weight loss
2 Body Mass Index (BMI) or 'Heft'
- Why is understanding your piggy's weight so important?
- 'Average' weight vs. individual weight - the big trip up
- How to check for the BMI
3 The Weekly and the Daily...
Overview
1 Not eating (anorexia) and the importance of syringe feeding fibre
2 Soft poos and runny diarrhea
3 Acute bloat (severe dysbiosis) - blockage - twisted gut - persistent milder bloating
4 GI stasis (no gut movement)
Severe runny diarrhea, bloat, blockage or a twisted gut, GI stasis and excessive salivating in guinea pigs that are not eating are absolute life and death emergencies that need to be seen ASAP by an out-of-hours vet at any time of the day or night or that should be seen by a vet as...
Overview
1 How the Digestive System Works
2 Poo Eating (Coprophagy)
3 Health Monitoring: Weighing vs. Poos Watching
- What does weighing do?
- What does the poop output tell you?
4 Minor Poop Issues
- How to deal with a minor tummy upset
- Funny poops: What do they mean?
- Caked on poops
5 Serious Diarrhoea...
Overview
1 The recommended ratio of food groups
2 Hay and fresh grass
3 Vegetables, fresh herbs and fruit with an illustrated balanced sample diet
4 Special dietary needs
- Urinary tract infections, bladder stones and sterile IC (non-bacterial interstitial cystitis)
- Diabetes and long term digestive problems
- Impaction in boars
- Pregnancy and nursing dietary tweaks (only visible to registered members who have accepted our no intentional...
