A guinea pig is quite simply one of the best pets that you can have. They’re cute, friendly, harmless, and you don’t need to take them out on a walk every day! Even their dietary needs are very manageable once you get the hang of it. But one of the most pressing issues with guinea pig care, especially when you’re getting a new one, is housing.
While regular store-bought cages might work well, hutches provide more room and are vastly more durable in comparison. Due to their spacious build, they also feel much more like a home and less like a jail cell than cages.
The major problem with hutches, though, has always been the price. They can be really expensive and fall beyond the affordability of most people. This is why building your own guinea pig hutch can be a great solution; not just because it’s cheaper but, if you do things right, also much more efficient.
While a hutch can be constructed both for indoor and outdoor housing, it might make more sense to just get (or build) a cage if your pig is going to be housed indoors. If your cavy is going to be living outdoors, though, you need to build a guinea pig hutch that is sturdy and well suited to the conditions outside of a home environment.
So the first thing you need to do is plan the hutch. The most important thing to consider here is the layout of the cage. Determining the layout means you’re going to look at your budget and decide if you can afford a bigger multi-sectioned hutch or just a basic version modeled more like a cage. This cage-like type of hutch is the most commonly used and cheaper to build.
Multi-sectioned hutches, on the other hand, are more expensive to build but are very spacious. The different sections (or ‘rooms’) can either be on the same level or on top of one another like a multistoried building. It is extremely uncommon and inadvisable to have more than two stories in a guinea pig hutch.
Regardless of which type of hutch you decide on, it’s recommended that you avoid building it entirely with wood. Instead, you should build it on a wooden frame but with wire mesh for the walls. The only exception to this is if you live in extreme weather conditions; in this case, you might want to construct the hutch entirely with wood but with a wire-mesh door for ventilation.
The roof of the hutch should be sloping away from the front and made of wood. For the floor, avoid using wire as it can be harsh on your guinea pig’s paws. Instead, use durable wood but make sure you have very good fleece or hay bedding when you put your pig in there. Otherwise, your cavy’s droppings will be really hard to clean and the whole hutch will smell really bad. It might also lead to infections for the pig.
When you’re ready to start building, draw a clear blueprint of what the hutch will look like. Then have the wood and wire cut out to fit the dimensions. Begin assembling it from the ground up but leave out the legs for later. You can fit these finally when you’re done with the roof.
Good luck!
Did you know that there’s a lot of terrible (and even harmful) advice on the internet about housing guinea pigs? Don’t fall for misinformation; head over to Guinea-Pigs-Care.com and check out the Guinea Pig Care Bible. It is a massive collection of tried and trusted information on guinea pig care, and instantly provides answers to all your guinea pig questions. Click here to check it out now.
Click here to view rest of article from original site
|
||||||
|
|
||||||
" />
