Bonding Help!
Hello peeg friends!
I could really use some help and opinions. I have two girls, Parmesan and Toast, parm is about 2.5yrs old (the Abby) and toast is about 4.5yrs old(the short haired calico). Parm came to me a couple months ago when toast lost her cage mate and I have been working really hard at trying to get them to bond. I’m not sure if it’s time to throw in the towel and accept they’ll just need separate cages forever or not.
I’ve attached some clips of them when they are “together” or as close as I’ve gotten them mostly successfully. So far they have done the best with a divider like this in between the neutral space. They normally do some loud rumplestrutting up and down the divider and sometimes some open mouth grab for each other. But they can also totally relax next to each other. Once I have been able to put them fully together without any death matches and they did actually nap next to each other for about 20 minutes, but when they woke up it was war again. Bad enough I had to throw a towel over both of them so they wouldn’t draw any blood. The argument in the video is pretty tame for when they decide to really go at it with each other.
I am somewhat at a loss, I’ve had guinea pigs for about 5 years now and never had an issue bonding like this. Maybe I’ve just gotten super lucky in the past. This will be poor toasts 3rd new cage mate so I wonder if she’s just over it at this point.
I will put a couple more pigtures in the comments since the post will only let one media form. If you’ve read the whole post I appreciate it and if anyone has any suggestions or opinions I would also greatly appreciate it! I love my pigs so much and only ever want to do what will make their lives the best possible. 💜🥬