sick pig

It has been a bad week for guinea pigs at our house. Somehow Slick escaped from his pen one night and he has not returned home. Summer Lily and I made signs the next morning and we put them up around the neighbourhood and gave them to our neighbours, and Paul and I looked for him at night. We miss him, and feel terrible. Paul and I are secretly hopeful that he made it up to the huge fields of timothy hay that grow up on the escarpment, up the street from our house.

And then last night poor Steve French got into a fight with *something*, we are not sure what (a cat or a racoon, I suppose). We have an outside pen (with boxes and houses for them to hide in) for the piggies so they can go outside in the nice weather and eat grass and popcorn around and they just love it. It makes them very happy. They are much contented piggies when they get to go outside. And we've never had a problem with letting them in their pen, and we are not sure what happened last night. Steve French is a little scuffed up and has some scratches and a little bit of hair pulled out in a few places. I felt sick all night long. I feel sick today. I feel terrible. He is not feeling well -- he feels cold and he is not eating on his own. He is walking (a bit, he will move around his cage a little bit), and he will look up to see me when I talk to him. But I am worried. I have been syringe feeding him, and I hope that he was still here this morning when I got up after a few hours sleep is at least a bit of a hopeful sign. I was up all night long, working, and feeding Steve French water with a baby eye dropper. Today I got out the guinea pig formula and am starting to feed him it every four hours. This is how I took care of the little white guy, who was the poor little white guinea pig (brother to Steve French and Slick) that was born when the girl piggies we gave to Summer Lily for her birthday two years ago had come home from the pet store pregnant. This little white guinea pig had a recessive genetic disorder called lethal white; he was deaf, blind, hunchbacked and could not eat on his own because his teeth were mis-shapen, so I syringe fed him every four hours with water and guinea pig formula, but he passed away a week after birth. I really hope Steve French will be OK. He's a cute little piggy, and the girls adore him, and I feel terrible that he got hurt. I keep sneaking out to his cage to check on him. I think I am hoping to discover that he has made some miraculous, full recovery.


Ashley.