5 Things About Guinea Pigs

5 Things About Guinea Pigs

Senses

Opthalmoception - a 340-degree telescopic sight enhances predator detection and helps them scrutinise at long-distance during vigilance - in exchange for poor depth perception. The brain's occipital lobe is adapted to register distant, moving objects more clearly, as with other types of prey. They also have a 4:1 rod-cone ratio in the retina, with a dichromatic vision of a green and blue colour spectrum.

Olfaction - primary ability for short-distance processing of stimuli, highly concentrated chemo-receptors exist in the nasal cavities - concerning the identification of odours and various individuals.

Audioception - capability for ultrasound perception, the highest hearing range is roughly 2.5x the maximum human frequency, facilitating long-distance intraspecific communication.

Gustation - high abundance of taste buds to identify food quality; domestic guinea pigs prefer sweet tastes, which they have changed, whereas wild cavies seemingly prefer bitter tastes, conceivably as an original adaptation because sweet foods are naturally less common.

Somatosensation - whiskers are the salient structure for touch - for example, nerve endings measure the width of a burrow in the dark to determine if they fit. Similarly, respecting height, they can press their nose ridge up against the top. Now... it's mostly devolved into a head flick/throw to get something, such as a human's finger/hand off when they get agitated or due to pressing too hard.

Anti-predatory strategies

Despite their wild instincts getting humanised, domestic guinea pigs can still discern between terrestrial and aerial predator types, adjusting their versatile anti-predator behaviour of freezing (tonic immobility), fleeing and vigilance accordingly, which has aided their predominant survivability in natural habitats. Fleeing is especially prominent in proportion to faster aerial predators - being a necessity to act quicker.

So, concerning their wild counterpart, cavies optimise survival chances by balancing anti-predatory behaviour with foraging and grazing durations. Environmental scanning rates/wariness heighten as they venture progressively outwards to more distant areas to mitigate risk, though it would be rarer for them to go further than four or five metres away from shelter, so they can swiftly revert.

Moreover, a close grouping formation decreases individual predation risk with sufficient visual coverage and aptitude for elusive dispersal. Correspondingly, foraging efficiency rises in groups - seeing as they can afford more time invested in grazing and commit to going further out from shelter. Alternatively, foraging alone may result in a reduced probability of getting located by predators at the expense of lower residence times and raised scanning rates for caution.

Peruvian Breed Genetics

The Peruvian Guinea Pig breed possesses abnormally long fur, up to 50cm in length, caused by the homozygous recessive allele pair for coat length. All Peruvians are affected for life and predisposed to the possible repercussions compromising life quality and welfare.

Peruvians cannot autogroom sufficiently due to said fur length; it is also rough and dense. As such, these characteristics correlate, accentuating fur susceptibility to frequent matting - becoming a tangled mass that individuals cannot alleviate without human attention.

Poorly maintained or neglected fur ensues in skin infections, ulcerations, overheating, impaired vision and induced eye inflammation/surface damage. Severe matting often eventuates in prolonged skin irritation, soreness, discomfort, infection - as well as interference with eating, mating, nursing and gait. Soiling is the worst extent since it eventualises in intensely painful flystrike. Therefore, to avoid suffering, prevention over resolution is paramount.

Domestic intellect

Domestic guinea pigs have substantially higher problem-solving, anticipatory, associative alongside spatial learning capacities than cavies in response to conditioning for behavioural reinforcement. They are understandably more socially tolerant, yet, less attentive; often found in domestic forms of other species, desensitising may be a coping mechanism to habituate to synthetic conditions.

In tandem, because acclimatising to human environment has promoted cognitive brain function, learning can gradually lessen environmental uncertainty that may instigate fear. Supposedly a bit of enrichment stress or environmental susceptibility is natural replication - arguably beneficial for engagement - as long as there is no excessive distress in particular.

Problems with people

Owners are largely ignorant of nutritional, social, housing and health standards where welfare could degrade rapidly into disease. They then undermine guinea pigs as dull creatures that don't do anything, mainly due to them getting placed into over-simplified environments deprived of enrichment/challenge and space to elicit their diverse personalities and behaviours, where people then still expect some form of entertainment value in return (works great for their children though).

These factors have led to compassionless dumping plus fickle mass returns post-covid. It is indicative of the lacking perspective for the different world they experience, almost like unconscious anthropomorphism.

We forget they are one of the most vulnerable, defenceless animals - highly sensitive to environmental variability, where unfamiliarity is tremendous for them even after domestication. There is no consideration of their capable attributes; or the suffering they endure in manipulative experiments for our medicine or overly specific knowledge.

Different cultural interpretations are comprehensible however; for example, third world countries in africa or the middle east cannot afford not to focus on themselves and have little educational accessibility. So consequently, less understanding, empathy and no standards of animal wellbeing comparatively.