The site for Guinea Pig, Piggy or Cavy lovers..

Guinea pig people know this already, but if you are thinking of keeping guinea pigs for the first time, be warned - guinea pigs (cavia porcellus to give them their Latin name and avoid confusion) are seriously addictive!  Whether it is the guinea pig's gentle nature or the wonderful guinea pig 'wheek wheek!' greeting that greets the rustling of a carrier bag or the opening of the fridge door, you can guarantee that guinea pigs will change your life forever.

Do you call them guinea pigs, cavies or piggies?

A nightmare for me doing search engine optimisation on these sites is trying to figure out what people search for when they find us. Who are our visitors? Are they 'piggy slaves' who know their way around the various piggy chat sites?  Cavy people who know the club, show and breeding circuit, regular guinea pig pet owners who's perhaps never heard them called cavies or pigs before? Please let us know by voting in our poll for the most commonly used term amongst visitors. Take Survey

What do you want to know about guinea pigs?

We have a number of sites all catering for different aspects of guinea pig keeping.  From getting your first guinea pigs (we use the plural because guinea pigs like the company of their own kind) through to where to find clubs, shows and guinea pig vets, we've tried to cover everything you could want to know about guinea pigs.

Where to find specific guinea pig information

The bulk of the general information on guinea pig health, behaviour, diet, origins etc  is held on our main site, Galen's Garden, but because Galen's Garden doesn't exactly say 'guinea pig', 'cavy' or 'piggies', we've built a few separate sites to make us easier to find.  To make our network of sites as interesting as possible for those interested in guinea pigs, we offer free mini-sites on our guinea pig related domains for people who have something interesting to say to other piggy people.  These include Cavy Rescue, Cavy Vets, Guinea Pig Shows, Cavy Breeders, Cavy Clubs, Guinea Pig Information and of course this site itself, Guinea Pig.

We have a Directory covering rabbits, guinea pigs, chinchillas and rodents because many rescues, pet holiday homes and online stores cover more than one type of animal.  There is a Classifieds Ads section, an FAQ, a Forum and an Events Calendar where we invite people to enter their rescue open days, shows, lectures and other events open to the public.  In addition to the comprehensive Links pages we also include external links to sites of particular interest on many of our pages.  The Site Map, which covers three hundred pages to date, gives a quick overview of the site and we also have a Shop selling specialist herbal products for guinea pigs and other small furries.

Where does the information come from and can I trust it?

The bulk of the site has been hand written and built by researcher Belinda Francis who also answers the FAQs.  Information in the Directory, Classifieds, Calendar, Forum, and the free mini-sites we let people use, are not under our control and you should make your own mind up about the quality of the information available there.  The external links have been included by Belinda for their value or interest to guinea pig people.  In building this site we have tried hard not to duplicate information that is already out there, but to link to it instead in a logical manner.  There are a lot of guinea pig sites on the Internet which makes it hard, even using search filters, to track down the precise information you need at any given time.  As this network of sites grows, we hope it will provide the most comprehensive resource for UK guinea pig information on the Internet.

Help us

Help us to build this guinea pig site into the best guinea pig resource around.  If you have information on guinea pigs, or provide goods or services of interest to the keepers of guinea pigs, please add your details to the Directory where you can also request a free mini-website on one of our domains.  Do you have interesting pictures of guinea pigs that we could use to illustrate any of our pages in exchange for a small fee or credit?  From cute piggy babies to horrible diseases such as bumblefoot and close-ups of running lice.  If you like the site then tell your friends and link to us.  If you don't, please use the contact form to tell us why.  Your feedback helps us make a better site.