The other day, mom's best art/spiritual friend, am, observed that she had always imagined that guinea pigs were just little animals who sat in bare cages doing nothing. We love am and when we heard this we realized how many other people must think the same thing-- HORROR OF HORRORS! And we know why...that is how we are depicted in the media and in petstores and on boxes and bags of pet food, the image of, oh, I can't go there again. Much can be said about today's media and how we guinea pigs are depicted, but my cousin, Pando, is an editorial commentator for NPR (NotEnough Pigs Rescued) and he gets pretty worked up about the subject so we'll save that for him. He will be featured in the near future.
Meanwhile, get a load of YumYum's digs: a loft with a ferret sleeping bag, a soft square house, a cardboard box to play with and chew on, his water bottle, food bowl, salt lick, tons of fresh timothy hay, and behind and beneath his loft is his special hiding place that nobody knows about except him. One day mom put a nice microfleece fabric in his soft house since it was cold but when she looked for it later it had disappeared. That's how she discovered the "Secret Garden." YumYum had pulled the microfleece out of his soft house and secretly stashed it in his Luxurious Secret Hiding Place. He has an image to keep up as a "tough guy" with the mohawk running down his back and that top notch on his head and he cops an attitude that he's Big & Bad. But secretly he's still a baby who loves to cuddle and he made his secret garden soft and cuddly -- and SECRET!
As you can see, however, he defies the common misconception that we sit, unmoving, poker-faced, staring into space in empty cages. And we hope that if you have a guinea pig his cage will be full of enrichment to stimulate his wildest imagination! AND that's just the cage...wait till you see our "Runabout" area - it's FUN on top of FUN!
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