Moving About

It's always 'fun' to play ring around the rosie with animals.
Especially the small pets when I'm trying to get more animals onto the floor.
As it takes a bit of creative juggling and crossed fingers to see if combining two different groups together will work out or not.

Today I was attempting to put guinea pigs together.
Which overall usually works out, but occasionally we get in a rather dominate male that doesn't like having new friends introduced to the cage....or doesn't like being introduced into a cage with a bunch of others.

We had one large cage of guinea pigs that had 8 in it.
And one medium cage of guinea pigs that had only 2.

And in that cage of two was a larger guinea pig and a smaller guinea pig.
For the past week or so I'd been monitoring the smaller guinea pig as he hasn't been acting quite right.
Like nothing obviously wrong.
But at the same time he didn't 'look' happy.
Constantly staying away from the other guinea pig and such.

So I pulled the larger guinea pig out and placed him in the big cage, and took out two smaller guinea pigs of similar size to the remaining guinea pig in the medium cage to see if that would help the guinea in the medium cage cope a bit better.

Only the larger guinea pig ended up butting heads with a white and brown guinea pig in the big cage.
So I figured, hey if the one guinea pig is being aggressive to the new guy...why not take out the white one and leave the new guy in there to make nice with the others.

So I pulled out the white one, stuck him with the smaller guinea pig, and placed the two smaller guinea pigs I'd taken out of the big cage back into that cage.

And for a while it worked out.
As smaller guinea pig and white guinea pig got along really well. Even resting next to each other! :D Which was great! It eased my mind----

Until bigger guinea pig in the big cage decided to be aggressive to everyone else. *exhales*

I knew that the original setup had worked out...but I was trying to decrease the stress of the smaller guinea pig.

So I ended up pulling the white and smaller guinea pigs out of the medium cage, placed them in the big cage and then pulled bigger guinea pig out and put him in the medium cage.
Not by himself though.
I grabbed the two smaller guinea pigs I'd grabbed earlier (as 2 on 1 is often better than 1 on 1) and placed the three of them together in the medium cage.

And walla!

It worked out. Whew.

But it took a lot of rearranging to manage that. *shakes head*

-Sarnic Dirchi