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Play and Feel-Good Tips: Keeping Guinea Pigs Busy

In addition to a large enclosure and run, guinea pigs need opportunities to play and feel good. We give you tips on how to keep your guinea pigs appropriate to their species.

Guinea pigs need a lot of variety, exercise, and activity so that they don’t get bored, stay healthy, and feel good. If the enclosure is too small and not irritating, the animals will just walk from their sleeping hut to the feeding place and back. This can lead to the guinea pigs getting fat or developing behavioral problems. We have play and comfort tips for your guinea pigs to counteract this!

Employment of guinea pigs by the enclosure facility

The be-all and end-all for keeping guinea pigs busy in setting up the enclosure correctly. Guinea pigs like to explore unfamiliar objects and move around a lot. Therefore, the following items for guinea pigs to keep busy should be in their enclosure:

  • stones
  • Hiding places (e.g. wooden houses with flat roofs)
  • tunnel
  • cork tubes, tubes made of clay or cardboard (diameter at least 15 cm)
  • willow bridges

Caution: Each cave must have at least two entrances so that no animal feels cornered.

Since guinea pigs like variety, it is advisable to change the objects over and over again and thus provide new ideas.

Adventure playground for guinea pigs

The free range of guinea pigs should also be varied. Here you have even more options than in the enclosure: You can design a real adventure playground for your guinea pigs. This not only keeps the guinea pigs busy physically but also mentally.

The same products are suitable for the adventure playground as for setting up the enclosure. Larger parts such as cardboard boxes are also available. Also, you can include the furniture in the guinea pig playground as long as everything is well secured and the guinea pigs cannot hurt themselves. This ensures varied employment!

Ramps are ideal for designing the adventure playground. You can use them to connect the individual products with each other:

  • The ramps can be made of a piece of wood about 20 cm wide, to which small strips are glued (so that the animals can run up and down safely).
  • It is important that the ramps are not installed too steeply (at a maximum angle of 20 – 30 degrees).
  • If your guinea pigs don’t use the ramps at first, you can encourage them to do so with a treat.

With the tunnels and tubes, you also have the opportunity to build your guinea pigs a whole maze when they run free! Your guinea pigs will feel at home with these play and activity opportunities.

Food as an occupation for guinea pigs

For guinea pigs to play and feel good, in addition to the right enclosure equipment, occupation with the food is also suitable: guinea pigs can be very well occupied with the help of healthy treats.

For example, give your guinea pigs (unsprayed) branches and twigs from apple, hazelnut, and pear trees as well as willow, currant, and blueberry bushes. The rodents will love nibbling on it.

So that the guinea pigs are even better occupied, it makes sense not only to put the branches in the enclosure or in the free-range but to put them out. Simply use a brick and place the branches in its holes. This is how you encourage your guinea pigs to exercise. You can also attach fruit and vegetable sticks to the upper points. This “food tree” not only helps against hunger but also against boredom!

Another option: attach the food to the cage rails so the guinea pigs have to stretch and stand up a bit to get to it.

All of these activity ideas are suitable for both indoor and outdoor keeping of guinea pigs. Outside you can also work with larger logs and plants.

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