First time mating questions?

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Lynx
Celebrate!!!

Post   » Mon May 28, 2018 8:26 am


What is the weight of the sow?

You would feed very similar food to what you are feeding for a young guinea pig:
diet.html

Read all you can about pregnancy. Be sure to have a vet lined up for general care and emergency care. Be sure to put a top on the cage of the sow and have her very secure.

You might want to post pictures of the sow's genitals in case it is actually a boar, which is what you were told, I believe.

bpatters
And got the T-shirt

Post   » Mon May 28, 2018 10:17 am


I'd have the boar neutered ASAP. But you only have to keep him separated for four weeks, not six.

It sure sounds like the baby is a sow. You can turn them both over and compare their pertinent parts to see if they're the same. If not, don't put them together at all until after he's neutered and the required time has elapsed.

For the confinement, you need a lid on the sow's cage, not the boar's. A boar can easily climb grids, and can push up a lid on his own cage, but can't lift a lid on the other cage.

JX4

Post   » Mon May 28, 2018 12:54 pm


How small is the young (possibly) sow? If she is very young and pregnant, you will need to make sure she gets LOTs of extra nutrients, especially calcium. That's why our Panda got two broken femurs -- she was too young when impregnated and was still developing herself even as she was growing babies inside her. The growing babies basically stole nutrients from her own developing bones which greatly weakened them.

If she does turn out to be a sow and is not pregnant, and if it were me, I'd neuter the boar, but not put them together until after the four weeks but also wait until the sow is big enough to resist the boar if she isn't interested in mating.

In our experience, boars will try to mate as much as the females will let them. (There's no "one and done.") When they are the same size and weight, the females are pretty successful in saying "no" when they aren't interested, but not when there is a significant size/weight difference.

If you neuter the boar before he is 5 or 6 months old, he will not grow any bigger than an adult female. At least ours didn't. Usually males will grow to be a lot bigger and heavier than the females when they are adults. When we babysat the two boys we rehomed when the new owners went on vacation about a year later, I was shocked at how much bigger the two intact male "babies" were than their dad, our neutered male. Our neutered male is the same size as the adult females in our herd, but those boys are so much bigger!

Another side advantage of neutering the boar will be he won't have a testicle sac to drag along the ground and get "stuff" up into his anal cavity. You have to clean intact boars' anal cavities fairly regularly (not sure how often, but I'm guessing at least monthly), but our guy doesn't have that problem. He's 3.5 years old now and I've checked him twice, with him not needing to be cleaned out either time.

If the little sow does turn out to be pregnant, do pump extra nutrients into her of course. You may not need to neuter the boar if she has a male baby -- then you could put the boys together and not neuter either of them. If she has female babies, you can neuter the boar to live with all the females.

But you will not be able to put two males together with females, even if they are both neutered. The neutering does NOTHING to lessen their sex drives, and they will fight non-stop over the females.

BTW, we did neuter or boar as soon as we discovered he was one, while our two sows were still pregnant. By the time he was able to go back in with them, they had given birth and we weren't sure how he'd do with tiny babies so he just got to watch from a distance (like a separate store-bought cage from across the room). When the pups were 3 weeks old, and we realized we had two males, we divided our large C&C cage and put the male pups in with Dad, which worked well since that wasn't a permanent arrangement.

The two boy babies wanted their moms, but having dad there helped. The first thing he did was stick his nose up their bums and flip them almost, I am guessing to check their sex. After that, the first thing they did to him was they tried to nurse from him, but he put a stop to that pretty quick, lol. After they realized they couldn't nurse from him, their relationship was great. He made a good dad, teaching them how to drink from a water bottle and generally being a comforting adult presence for them in the absence of their mothers.

We rehomed the male babies when they were about two and a half months old. At that point they were still getting along with dad. When they visited a year later when we were babysitting them, I made the mistake of putting dad in with them for floor play time. Ugh. They about killed him cuz they were almost twice his size by then and there is no such thing as guinea pigs respecting their parents. Didn't make that mistake again.

Anyhow, our herd is pretty happy together. The male will rumblestrut (low purring while doing a sumo wrestler dance with his hind end) to ask the girls if they are "in the mood." Most of the time they ignore him, or if he gets too pushy, they'll nip his nose and/or chase him away. The females do, however, all come into heat at around the same time, which means our boy is told "no," "no," "no," most of the time and then it's "YES!" by nearly all of them at once, lol.

User avatar
RavenShade
Thanks for the Memories

Post   » Fri Jun 01, 2018 2:15 pm


I'm just chiming in on the comment that males cannot live in a larger herd. I have had herds of 2-5 males only, none of them neutered, and most of them (like now) not related, some of them introduced as adults. It can be done. They need extra space, though.

A very long time ago we were hobby breeders. One of the considerations for no longer continuing to allow pigs to breed was when my favorite sow died from pregnancy complications after several successful litters. Now our pigs only live in single-sex herds. My mom has sows. I have boars.

User avatar
Catt of the Garage

Post   » Tue Jun 05, 2018 10:27 am


Ethics are contextual. If we lived in a world where guinea pigs were scarce, the ethics around breeding would need to be considered in that light, balancing the risk to the sow with the continued existence of the species.

Sadly, we don't live in that world. Maybe our pigs would like to have babies (my boars would certainly like to make them!) but we have to make that decision for them, and with pigs being mass-bred, neglected and abandoned pretty much everywhere, it seems to me that rescuing is a higher priority.

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