(photograph © Kiwidutch)
Our family not be able to keep pets due to allergies but my best friend keeps a miniature zoo’s worth so our children love going to her place to play with all the animals.
She’s definitely the most dedicated pet owner I know: most of her cats and dogs came to her with problems, for instance her dogs are all rescue animals, not the easiest to re-home due to the terrible experiences and treatment they have received from previous owners.
She takes care of all of their medical needs and understands the responsibility of giving them love, attention and a lot of tender loving care so that they can feel safe once more and live out their lives in a far happier state than the state they were in when she first met them.
She has converted one of her spare rooms into the guinea-pig wing, and after trying out a two storied tall rabbit hutch for them, she found that they all preferred to huddle together on the lower level and could only be enticed to the upper level by the presence of food. After they had eaten they would scurry as quickly as possible back down to the lower level, which with the four of them, was rather overcrowded.
(photograph © Kiwidutch)
My friend is a serious pet owner, medical needs like neutering are taken care of and when it’s clear that the accommodation for the guinea-pigs wasn’t suited to them, she looked for a better solution. This resulted in a single very large cage, it’s about the size of an single bed but provides ample room for the four guinea pig house-mates. Since there are three females and one rather fat male, and they are named “Hyacinth, Daisy, Rose and Onslow (he’s the fat dude in the corner) ” after characters from the British TV series “Keeping up Appearances”.
Then she turned her attention to the little balcony outside this room: lining the sides and bottom with very fine mesh chicken wire, added artificial grass to the floor, this would give the guinea-pigs their very own safe outdoor play area in fine weather. She was in the middle of telling me that she thought the next step should be to get a hole cut in the window glass so that she could insert a plastic pipe the could be the connecting tunnel between outside and in.
I looked at her and asked, How would you close that off in winter? or if you were away on holiday and someone else was to look after the pets? My idea would be to install instead a normal cat-flap of the sort that can be locked and in turn, just put a plastic pipe through the cat flap to act as the tunnel whenever she wants the guinea-pigs to have access to the enclosure on the balcony. She loved this idea…
I in turn love that’s she’s very creative when it comes to her pets well-being and wants the very best care for them. The world needs more people like her.
(photograph © Kiwidutch)
(photograph © Kiwidutch)
(photograph © Kiwidutch)
(photograph © Kiwidutch)
(photograph © Kiwidutch)
(photograph © Kiwidutch)
