How To Make Guinea Pig Food

Hi. My name's Marie. I'm the deputy manager of the Small Animal Department of Wood Green Animal Shelters in Cambridge here.

I'm going to advise you how to care for guinea pigs. I'm going to tell you how to make guinea pig food. The diet of a guinea pig should be kept as natural as possible.

Avoid all these different types of colorants and salt licks and mineral blocks. Keep the food as natural and fresh from your garden as possible. The most important part for guinea pigs' diet is hay and this should be really good quality, green, fresh meadow hay.

About 80% of their diet should be made of hay and different types of grasses. Your guinea pigs should be allowed to go out in the grass for at least 4 to 6 hours everyday, obviously weather permitting. They should be free to grace on all sorts of different types of grass in your garden and they'll also find different weeds in there such as plantain and mellow.

These are all healthy and this is the best part of their diet. A great idea is to be able to grow for your own food for your guinea pig. So in your garden, you could be growing different types of carrots, turnips and even your roses and raspberries as well.

Raspberries, blackberry leaves and strawberry leaves are fantastic for their digestive system. So if ever they've got an upset diet, just boost their diet with hay and a few selection of leaves from your blackberry or raspberry and it really helps settle their digestive system down. Another good one is wild duranium often most people have in the garden, not to be mistaken for the common house duranium.

Guinea pigs absolutely love it and it really encourages them to start eating again if maybe they've gone up their food. So, you can also grow different types of cabbages, curly cale and mint, lemon balm and lavender, all different types of herbs. When you're providing guinea pigs the food, be interesting about it.

Scatter it around in their accommodation, in their run or in the hutch. You could even make things such as hay kabobs as well. These are simply made from toilet rolls and you can use any fruit trees in your garden.

So if you've got any apple, pear, cherry or even willow, you can pop some twigs in there, pop some really good quality hay, and then you could put in your herbs and vegetables that you've grown in the garden. Just stuff them in there and that's really great fun for guinea pigs to be able to roll around and nibble different foods out of there. So as I mentioned, their diet should be healthy and it should be as natural as possible, lots and lots of hay, lots of grass and plants and herbs from your garden.

And that's how to make guinea pig food. .