The Boy's Page

This is Cholo doing his impression of a carrot shark! We bought a bag of Oxbow Hay, very good quality, unfortunately, very expensive! Anyway, before I built the hayrack in that corner I would throw a pile of hay over there, the boys would tunnel around in it and pop up if they thought they might catch an unsuspecting carrot on the surface. I'm not sure, but I believe that Charlie and Mishka are in there somewhere. You can clearly see all three of them in this shot. Here they are all roaming around in the hay. Stills really can't do justice to it, but whenever I would put the Oxbow hay in, they would start popcorning like lunatics. If I hadn't read about this in the Guinea Pig Daily Digest, I would have thought all of them were having seizures and were going to die!

As they've gotten bigger, their temperments seem to have changed a bit. Plus, an incident this past summer caused a problem between the boys, so I've had to seperate Mishka from the other two. As you can see here, Cholo is having an "argument" with someone off to the right. This is how two males will look when having a face off. The hackles rise, the teeth chatter. The next step is to rise up as tall as they can to look even bigger. Final confrontation may take the form of a rush at each other, and an airborne jump and bite! To say the least, we try to avoid these incidents as much as possible. On more than one occasion I have found little clumps of hair on the floor after one of these "discussions." The part I can't figure out is, if you seperate them, they cry for each other. Remind me of some human children, they fight constantly, but cry miserably when seperated.

The boys also enjoyed being cuddled by anyone, but especially by my wife, Betsy. She seemed to have a great knack for keeping them from fighting. When I would hold more than one boy, invariably there would be heated debate about who got to face which way, who was at the top (or bottom) of the pile, ad infinitum! But with Betsy, they would sit quietly (for teenagers!) and look around, with one occasionally going up to check out an ear or chin. This, of course, tickles!

I've decided to give each boy his own page, so please visit Mishka, Charlie and Cholo on their own pages. But be warned, not only are they too cute for their own good, there are a lot of pictures so the pages may be slow!