This month's guinea pig litters - interesting

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akane

akane

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I have collected the sows ready to pop soon. I have 1 maybe I am watching but she is quite young for getting pregnant and I'm hoping she's not. I'd like to sell her and the red sow who didn't get pregnant this time around.

Iro, Setsu, and Hatsu. Hoping for chocolates and creams. Unless I get something really interesting all of this round is for sale or food because I want to work on the roans.







 
I live in Florida and I have guinea pigs also to me they are harder than rabbits but just as fun. My question is what is the going rate for them if I decide to sell? I understand the different area different price thing but just an idea.
 
I guess its just me.... I dont have any luck with them. After a ton of research I bred my first 2 females. One took one didnt. The one that took had 4 babies 2 doa and 2 alive. the first was alive the doa then alive the doa. I dont understand how that happened. I had the male outside I brought him in when it started to really heat up outside. He seemed to be doing good but then I found him dead one morning not sure why. The people I got him from said he was only 2 yrs old but who truly knows how old he was.
 
I don't control breed guinea pigs like rabbits. I pitch them in with the boar indefinitely. I might pull the sows out like this when they look obvious so the pups are easier to handle, keep track of who produced what, and the sows get a 3 week break. After 3 weeks the pups are weaned by the sow going back with the boar. That's pretty much the standard way of guinea pig breeding. If you aren't breeding for show many just leave them with the boar and remove the young ones as needed. It really simple. Just feed them right and out pop pups fairly regularly.

I do not sell anything for less than $20 cause my time is worth at least that much. Right now I am selling $20 for one or 2 guinea pigs to encourage having 2 since they are very social and then I ask $10 each for 3+. Mine are not show pigs though. You can get up to around $40 each for properly colored, tagged and pedigreed show stock.
 
Aww, I thought about guinea pigs before I got into the rabbits, but GPs are so loud, plus everything I've ever read just talks about the mortality rate in pregnant sows and how easy it is to lose them during or after the birth, so I went with rabbits lol.

I like the tricolor looking one and the tan and black one :popcorn:
 
I would say the mortality rate is at or a little lower than dwarf breed rabbits. Much the same with litter sizes. 3-4 but sometimes 5-6 usually from sows that have had several litters. They may not out produce meat rabbits but they are interesting and they can live on scraps instead of high protein pellets. I love the range of colors. Setsu actually had her litter but we are at my husband's parents' house for the day and I didn't have time for a pic before leaving. <br /><br /> __________ Tue Aug 11, 2015 7:30 pm __________ <br /><br /> 1 grey agouti (replacing my lemon agouti if it's a boar), 1 regular brindle, and one diluted brindle out of the cream and black sow.




It turns out my maybe in another cage was pregnant but so far there has only been a large stillborn. A singleton like that as a first litter is common in sows that breed a little too young. Reason I usually separate out my sow pups to grow separately from the breeding colony unlike a lot of the people breeding for meat. Lowers the odds a little of losing a first time sow.
 
One breeder here got lucky wih 8 pups :)
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I would love to have guinea pigs again, I had them all my childhood, but the market is overcrowded with them and I don˙t know if I could sell any. On top of all, it is impossible here to get really big peruvian ones (to eat).
 
The peruvian cuy are spreading fast. There's some here in the midwest now. The west coast breeders are shipping country wide. There's some people on the east coast with them. I don't have the money right now for them because they are still selling $100-$200 a sow. Even if I had the money I'd kinda rather wait for the cost to come down. With how fast new breeders are working with them and the group on facebook is making plans to import another set of bloodlines in large quantity they should be easy to get and with the price dropping in a couple years.

We had litters up to 9 when I was a kid. I'm just not seeing it with my current guinea pigs so I'm not quoting those sizes right now but I know the big litters tend to come with age on the sow. Also I have a very tentative theory that sows with more space to be more active and more cavy to interact with tend to have more pups fully develop. I've seen a huge difference in colony sows versus my sows in 2x3 and 2x4' cages but only one generation so far. When I was really young we gave our guinea pigs the run of a whole fenced backyard and then when we moved I would put them out in a 12x12' or 12x24' horse stall late spring through late fall, sell off everything I didn't want to keep for next year's breeding, and cage them in same gender pairs over winter. So we've always bred them in large spaces when we were getting the large litters.
 
People here would think of me as a laughing stock if I import just a guinea pig in Europe, I don`t believe that we have breeders anywhere around. Even with dogs, people here have a really hard time to pick up a puppy from a breeder in another end of the country and they want to meet at least half way or are asking around if anyone is going that way so he could pick up and bring the puppy to them. We are so big that you can get through the country from border to border in 3 hours :D

Could you please explain the different names? Cuy is peruvian meat pig, but what about guinea pig vs. cavy?
 
Cuy, guinea pig, cavy are all basically the same thing. Arguments have never reached a conclusion on where the term guinea pig ever came from. Cuy stands for the sound the animals make. Cavy is part of the scientific name. Different groups have applied the different words to their animals. Cuy was thought of as just the south american term for a guinea pig but is now mainly used for the large meat version being imported. Nearly all pet owners and pet stores will use guinea pig and calling them cuy or cavy is just a novelty among that group of people in the US. The ARBA and shows use cavy and so most show breeders use cavy but no one found it odd to talk about "guinea pigs" with me. The new popularity as meat animals has led to many meat breeders calling the small US version cavies as well but some still say guinea pig.
 
I knew this litter would be interesting but this is not what I planned. I think I combined too many dilution genes (there is no single albino gene,"c", for guinea pigs). I'm gonna say they are pink eye not ruby eye white which would make them ee chch with ee also removing the points in guinea pig colors instead of just the body color like a tort.



That ends this month's litters with 4 litters technically. 8 healthy and 1 stillborn from that maybe I caged separately from the nursery pen. Skip a month and we start counting litters again around oct.
 

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