Nutrition for Guinea Pigs

 

Nutrition for Guinea pigs is an important feature to be taken care of by any persons or institution taking care of these tiny species. Yeah. If you want to maintain proper health care of these species, you need to pay additional emphasis on the nutrition for Guinea pigs.

This is because of the fact that the guinea pigs are the species that equals the human beings in terms of metabolism of lipoproteins in the plasma component.

Majority of cholesterol due to the feed provision in guinea pigs circulate in LDL, like man and this is a striking similarity to metabolism in man. Adequate vitamins and minerals are the must in the nutrition for Guinea pigs.

Scurvy may affect these tiny research model animals if sufficient vitamin C is not provided in the diet. Hence, a daily intake of ten milligrams of vitamin C is highly required to prevent the development of scurvy in them.

Documentations are available that the deficiency of vitamin C may lead to this problem within a span of seven to ten days.

Avoid feeding of these animals with mixed feeds containing the nuts, dried fruits and seeds.

Yeah. You need to take care of feeding by providing the feeds or preferably the pellets in time. Many may opt for feeding twice a day.

If there is more guinea pig pellet feeds on bowl after an hour, it indicates that you provided more feed. This may lead to obesity. If fewer quantities are seen, you might not have fed adequately. So, you need to make a trial and error based feeding.

However, you see that the animals are neither hungry nor over fed. Though many persons may say that these animals thrive well on rabbit pellets, it seems better to provide the specific guinea pig based feed materials.

Hay may be kept as the only feed that becomes available through out the day. Nursing and the pregnant animals may be in need of additional feed or nutrients.

For example, they are in need of twenty milligrams of vitamin C, daily. Proper balance of calcium, phosphorus and vitamin C helps to avoid the supplementation of vitamin D.

However, provision of fresh fruits, vegetables and others like apples, bananas, tomatoes, spinach, green and red bell peppers, baby carrots, oranges, oats, mustard greens etc. may be given as the routine feed materials.

Water may be available through out the day. Avoid shelled nuts and seeds for these species, while you give nutrition for Guinea pigs. During the provision of nutrition for Guinea pigs, raw beans may be avoided since they are poisonous to them.

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