I didn’t know that you had to weigh guinea pigs until about a month ago. I adopted my piggies just around 5 months ago, and when I found out I immediately ordered a scale. That took two weeks to ship and ended up being broken, so just this week we got a working scale. I am currently weighing them daily since they are separated and living as neighbors (they had a bad fight where blood was drawn). Pumpkin (2-2.5 yrs) came in at 923 grams, but Peanut (1 year) was 840 grams. I’ve read that a healthy weight it 900-1200 grams for a male adult guinea pig. Is Peanut a healthy weight for his age or should it be a cause for concern?
Hi!
Cheap kitches scales from any larger supermarket are perfectly adequate for monitoring any weekly (or daily in the case of illness) weight changes; it is not like you need to compute medical dosages like a vet, who needs exact scales.
How To Pick Up And Weigh Your Guinea Pig Safely
Forget about 'average healthy weights'; they encompass only about 50% of all piggies. That doesn't mean that the other half are not healthy or normal. Adult weight can vary much more than 'average' - the weight range can be every bit as large as the human one without being necessarily individually unhealthy. Include to that the fact that weight actually naturally changes over the course of a life.
Important is not how much your piggies weigh but that they are a good weight for their size (BMI or heft). You feel for that around the ribs. Our weight guide will explain exactly where to feel and what you need to look for to assess whether your piggies have a healthy ratio. The BMI will give you general ball park in which the individual healthy weight should be and is a much better measure to work out whether your boys are a healthy weight as this works for any age and size.
This brings me to the second headache that comes from promoting an 'average healthy weight' - the instinctive urge to overfeed smaller piggies with calorific filler foods instead of concentrating on a long term healthy grass hay based diet, which is much more important for long term health and a long life than an average weight.
Your piggies are young enough to realise their optimum weight and health just on a normal good general diet with unlimited grass hay, a small amount of preferably green and leafy veg and 1 tablespoon max of pellets per piggy per day. The more hay and fresh dog pee free grass your piggies eat, the generally healthier they will be and the longer they will live. You can never prevent medical issues that are genetically determined or that just happen but you can minimise the illnesses that stem from a bad diet and boost life expectancy for another 1-2 years. The actual individual weight is very secondary to all of this.
Long Term Balanced General And Special Needs Guinea Pig Diets
Please take the time to carefully read our weight guide; it looks at weight in a very comprehensive way, from how it changes over life, how you work out the BMI, what to look for during the life long weekly weigh-in and body once-over, which kind of weight loss (or sudden gain) needs attention how urgently; how you deal with real underweight and overweight; healthy and unhealthy support foods, treats and exercise etc. The whole field is much more encompassing and complex but also highly fascinating in how things play into each other and interconnect in ways that are not necessarily obvious.
Here is the guide:
Weight - Monitoring and Management
Does it help you when I tell you that a goodly number of my own adopted piggies from a bad background tend to be at the lower end of the scale but that the majority nevertheless lives a healthy normal life span of 5-8 years?
My sisters Heulwen and Hedydd both weighed just around 800g in the prime of their lives after being rescued from a backyard 'cat's takeaway' uncontrolled free roaming breeding situation - but both lived to celebrate their 8th birthday.
My sisters Mererid and Morwenna (who weighed only 40g when born and needed extra support when born to a newly rescued highly pregnant sow from a long term inbreeding background in a true hellhole masquerading as 'sanctuary') are just one month short of their 7th birthday. Morwenna was always the smallest of the sisters but nevertheless she may outlive her sisters as Mererid's kidneys have unfortunately started to go into age related failure.
Teggy is now 5 years old; when she and her mate Nutkin were surrendered to rescue at one year of age, they were weighing just as much as babies (350-400g) with severe scurvy and dental issues due to a diet on mainly totally unsuitable rabbit pellets. Nutkin sadly didn't make it but Teggy did catch up after some specialist dental treatment and became downright fat because her body was turning everything she eat into fat due to her early life.
Just to give you a bit of an idea how complex the whole field is... and that any weight charts are not worth the space they take up.
