A local fun or charity pet "show" with competition categories like 'who is the fastest eater' is something completely different from professional breeding shows for perfect piggies.
If you want to take part at a local pet show, please make sure that your piggies are confident enough to cope with the stress of being out of their usual surroundings, the general hubbub and with being handled by strangers; the interests and welfare of your piggies should be paramount, not your own desire for a bit of fun!
Cavy Corner Sanctuary for instance take great care that only piggies who are fine with this go with them to events, to schools for education purposes or to care homes. They have got a network of volunteers who handle and cuddle the Sanctuary piggies to make sure that all get regular human attention.
The second category of pedigree shows unfortunately creates a tier of piggies that are not up to standard and that often end up as neglected second class citizens or being sold without any care for what kind of home they go to. This often gets even worse for no longer needed breeding sows or stud boars.
Professional breeders are mainly there for business/selling and not for the sake of animal welfare purposes. We also do not agree with some professional showing practices like forcing long-haired piggies to live with curlers in order to keep their coat pristine nor with the often far too small cubicles in which they are kept all their life long, as well as the way they are often ripped in and out of any established bonds without any consideration for guinea pig instinct and social protocols.
We are well aware that there are some very caring and welfare-conscious people amongst the breeders and have no truck with them whatsoever, but in our and their own experience they are sadly still very much a minority. Animal welfare is something that needs to be as urgently discussed and redefined on the breeding side (who so far seem only concerned with showing standards, but not so much with how they are achieved) as do rescue standards and the need for licensing on the rescue side. As long as there are no clear rules and standards of care, we have to draw our own lines as a forum.
Sadly, several good standard small guinea pig rescues have been brought to the brink or beyond by having job lots of no longer wanted and often pregnant/neglected breeder piggies dumped on them, often with them being lied to or even openly abused by unscrupulous people eager to unload.
The latest victim of that is a RNGP Welfare in Rugby which was the only rescue with a spaying policy in the UK and which did a great service to mainly older bereaved or young unbondable boars all over the country, but which closed down at the beginning of this year after finding a lot cardboard boxes with 16 mostly pregnant sows and 5 boars dumped on their drive one Sunday morning - they ended up with well over 30 babies (and a deadborn/dying baby in nearly every litter) in the end and struggled especially to find homes for all the white/pink-eyed boys. This was sadly the straw that broke the camel's back after all mums and babies were found new homes...
Unfortunately, we have made the experience as a forum that whenever we have a line somewhere in the middle, it gets inevitably poked at. Breeding and showing are areas that many people are passionate about, and we have had very heated discussions in the past, which have created a tense general atmosphere on the forum and caused unhappy/upset members to withdraw or leave. Hence our "zero" stance.
@lisaali
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