Guinea pig adoption: Settled in!

A few weeks ago, I wrote about how we were struggling with our guinea pig adoption. We’d had our rescue guinea pig, Zebedee, for nearly two months and we still couldn’t trust him to be around our old guinea pig, Herbert.

They were together in the run in the garden, but I was struggling to integrate them in the hutch. Every time I put them together, Zebedee made this horrible teeth chattering noise with his teeth and launched himself at Herbert. In the early days, there had been blood!

I was swapping them around in the hutch (one was living upstairs and the other downstairs), so they were living with each others’ scent, but I felt I needed to start putting them together for a couple of hours a day.

Then, a few days after my post about my struggles to get Zebedee to settle, I found that Herbert had fallen or jumped to the bottom of the hutch. It had happened a couple of times before. This time, I found him in the morning, and it was clear from the bowl full of vegetables upstairs in the hutch, that they’d been together for well over 12 hours.

There was no blood and no horrible teeth chattering noise.

It seemed that they had done of their own accord what I had struggled to do!

So I got the ladder for the inside of the hutch. That way, they could escape from each other a bit if they wanted to, but they were actually living together.

I kept a food bowl and water bottle upstairs for a couple of weeks, just in case one of them wanted to remove themselves for an extended period. I also kept a bed downstairs for the same reason.

But it seems that they were suddenly friends.

They were eating together and sitting together. They weren’t chasing each other or lashing out at each other.

So many times I’d questioned myself about whether keeping Zebedee was the right thing to do. But the longer I kept him, the more reluctant I was to let him go. I hoped and believed that one day they could be friends. I just had to give it time.

It took a lot more time than I expected. But it seems that the guinea pig adoption has finally worked out. Zebedee is settled! I’m very glad I stuck with him and didn’t give up.