Yes, Guinea Pigs Need Floor Time!
Ideally guinea pigs should have floor time a couple of hours a day. Floor time helps give your guinea pigs additional exercise and mental stimulation, keeping them healthier and happier. And while it may be fun doing it the first few times, it can turn into a drudge unless you've got a good and easy system. Floor time should always be fun as it gives you more of a chance to interact with your guinea pigs as well. And the more floor time and interaction you have with your guinea pigs, the more they look forward to it and love it as well.
There are many ways to approach and setup up floor time. They all depend greatly on many personal factors that are probably unique to you. But, we all face the same basic issues:
- Space: Where to set it up?
- The Floor: How to protect your carpets or hardwood floors.
- Portability: Most of us need an easy-to-setup and easy-to-take-down floor-time strategy.
- Permanent or Semi-Permanent: If you have a permanent spot reserved for floor-time, great! This solution works for you, too.
- Safety: Making sure it's in a space with no exposed wires or unsafe spaces.
- Convenience: Easy-to-clean-up after floor time.
- Piggies: Encouraging them to move around with interesting activities and items (we'll cover that next wheek!).
- Piggies: Getting them in and out of the cage for floor time (we'll cover that in a future post as well).
Simple, Easy-to-Clean Floor Time Solution
- Find a spot. Typically, the best place is located underneath or near your current guinea pig cage, although it doesn't have to be. It's likely underneath some other kind of furniture as many of us have smaller homes and rooms.
- Pick up a NEW CAGE BASE! When you've decided where you want to put your floor time area, decide how much length you can accommodate, and choose a new Coroplast base with that length or under. For example, many tables used to accommodate a LARGE, 2x4 grid cage, can fit a smaller 2x3 length Coroplast base underneath.
- MODIFY the new Cage Base as you desire. Fasten one corner flap for a corner location or possibly two for a wall or for sliding it under furniture. Other cage walls can be folded or easily cut off as needed.
- Top with Fleece Bedding over the Coro. Get a cage liner that is at least as big as the coro bottom so the whole thing is covered. Having extra on the edges or ends is fine. The guinea pigs will be doing most of their business in the corner, not the outer perimeter.
- Need it Portable?Just use a binder clip instead of the rivets to secure whatever corners you need. They work great for this purpose. They are super easy to clip on and off, AND when you want to put it away, simply roll up your fleece, fold up the coro and secure it with the binder clip(s) that you used to secure the corner. Fold it up, store it out of the way, perhaps behind your current cage. Boom, done!
- Need it Semi-Permanent? If you aren't going to be moving and storing it much, you can use the Cagetopia Rivets that come with our cage bases to secure your desired corner flaps.
