Makes and Models – Part One
We’ve had many different types of guinea pigs through our doors here at North East Piggy Boarding (NEPB). This has given us ample opportunity to have a close look at them and decide which ones we like the best…obviously this hasn’t happened, as we love all the guinea pigs and the different characters that go along with them!
Owners are often very interested in what type of guinea pigs they own and we’ve been asked lots of questions about this, so we thought we’d try to write about it and hopefully help along the way. Obviously we aren’t going to do a huge list but thought we’d start with the letter A and work our way through the alphabet over the coming weeks. So here’s the start of an alphabetical run down of the ‘makes and models’ with a few lovely examples 🙂
Agouti
A fairly easy piggy to care for as the hair is usually short. The colouring on these piggies is beautiful; they have a solid colour underneath and a ticking on the top, which is another way of saying flecks of colour. There are 6 different colour variations:
• chocolate brown with orange flecks
• chocolate brown with lemon flecks
• cinnamon brown with silver
• black hair with silver flecks
• black hair with lemony yellow flecks
• black hair with gold.
The most common one we’ve seen here is the silver agouti, a black body with silver flecks/ticking.
Ollie is a silver agouti and you can just see Brownie
Harry Higgs is a lemon agouti.
Harry Higgs showing off his lovely lemon tummy!
Abyssinian
They come in a variety of colours (brindles) and have swirls of hair along their bodies with 6-8 tufts. The ‘perfect’ abby will have one on each shoulder, two or four on their back, and one on either side of their hips, making a symmetrical pattern as seen in the picture of Tommy below.
The brindles of an abby are mainly red and black but tortoiseshells have patches of colour, dotted around with no symmetrical pattern. Poppy is a tortoiseshell abby, so she may not be ‘perfect’ with a symetrical pattern but she’s still a ‘perfect’ piggy to us!
Tommy
And just to confuse matters…Clove (piggy on the right) is both
