On Keeping Guinea Pigs
Introduction.
This series of articles will discuss the small-scale rearing of Guinea Pigs for food and pets. By way of introduction, let us discuss the history and origin, taxonomy and varieties of the guinea pig (Cavia porcellus).
The origin of the guinea pig is unclear but the wild form (Cavia aperea) is widely distributed in Argentina, Uruguay and Brazil; with Cavia cutleri still wild in Peru. It is called cuyo, cobayo or curi in Spanish, and is one of the few animals that was able to be domesticated in the Americas in pre-Colombian times along with the llama. The Spanish found that the Andean Indians had domesticated Cavia cutleri and used them as food and for religious sacrifices. With the establishment of the Spanish Colonial Empire, they continued to be used for food. It is an interesting aside that paintings such as the last supper have included the guinea pig as the main course meal!
In the 1500’s, Dutch sailors introduced the guinea pig into Europe and by the 1770’s, they probably reached the United States as pets and fancy animals. Today, guinea pigs are still raised as a meat animal mostly in the Andean countries of Peru, Ecuador, Bolivia and Colombia. In Peru alone 21 million guinea pigs are raised, with 65 million animals slaughtered yearly, producing 16,500 tons of high quality meat (which is 6.5% of Peru’s meat production), most of which is consumed by the poorer rural population where it is an important source of animal protein. In the rest of the world, guinea pigs are generally raised as pets or as laboratory animals which are used to test new drugs and products before further testing in humans.
The origin of the name “guinea pig” is vague and the name used by “people in the know” or fanciers is “cavy.” It has been suggested that “guinea” may have been derived from the fact that trading ships may have travelled via Guinea in West Africa or by way of Guiana, take your pick! Undoubtedly, however, the fact remains that a prepared cavy does resemble a suckling pig; the carcass is prepared for eating by scalding and scraping, just like a hog; adult females are called “sows,” while adult males are called “boars” and the process of giving birth, or parturition, is referred to as “farrowing.” Finally, as anybody who has kept guinea pigs can attest, they just can’t stop eating and make absolute, well…pigs of themselves!
I’m going to sneak the taxonomy of the guinea pig in right here in one long sentence for completeness sake, which hopefully some of you will read and many of you will forget as quickly as possible; much like a ride to PG on a regular James Line Bus! Here goes: The guinea pig belongs to the Animal Kingdom (surprise, surprise!); in Phylum Chordata (has notochord and gills…do any of you know what that means?!?); in Class Mammalia (warm-blooded craniates with a hair coat and which nourish their young from mammary glands); in Order Rodentia (have a single row of upper and lower paired incisors which grow continuously; no canine teeth…yeah, like rats); of the Family Caviidae (tailess South American rodents with one pair of mammary glands; four digits on the front feet and three digits on the hind feet); Genus Cavia; Species porcellus (you guessed it…that means pig!).
To finish off this first installment, let’s talk about guinea pig varieties: Since most cavy fanciers are not into eating their charges, varieties or “types” or “breeds,” are characterized by the length, texture and direction of growth of hair, not juiciness of meat, crackliness of roasted skin or dressed carcass weight. The English variety have short, smooth, straight hair; the Abyssinian varieties are characterized by short, coarse hair that radiate from multiple centres on the body to form rosettes; and the Peruvian variety has long, silky hair up to six inches (15 cm) long. All varieties come in solid colours (including albino, white, black, agouti, red, chocolate…and lots more), or are bi-coloured or tri-coloured. Members of the various Cavy Associations throughout the world will take offence at this vast over-simplification of varieties but such is life and most of us can Google if we want more detail. I don’t think the Ag Report readership cares about the different laboratory strains (and there are many!) so I haven’t even mentioned them.
In our next issue, we will discourse on the anatomy and physiology of guinea pigs.