Recently, we acquired two male guinea pigs. One is young, the other is mature. They get along just fine, miraculously! We grew to love them both, very much, and then the younger one started showing signs of not being quite "right". This is our little guy - isn't he cute?
He routinely manufactured 50, that's right, 50 pellets - within 15 minutes. I have owned many, many guinea pigs, and never encountered THAT before. He also did not seem to gain very much weight, in comparision to the food he devoured. We think his digestive system is "awry".
Then, he started coughing, and being listless - almost to the point of death. He shivered, and sneezed, and would "go limp" when we picked him up. For a "squirrely" guinea pig like this little fellow, that was not a pleasant site to see. Usually, he would be "bouncing off the walls" - endowed with enough energy for 5 guinea pigs.
I researched every site I could, to help him. Never, had I seen anything remotely close to his symptoms. He did not want to eat, or drink - even blueberries were spurned. We noticed that he started breathing loudly and rapidly, and acting like he was choking on something. Because he tends to eat his bedding - lots of guinea pigs do - we started keeping him on old bath towels. That seemed to help. We also stopped giving him timothy hay, because every time he appeared to recover - he would eat a lot of hay, and drink water, and start coughing again. We switched to alfalfa hay, with the same results. He would eat hay, and within hours, the cough returned.
No more hay for him, we decided. That seemed to help, but it did not get him "up and running" again. So, because we already knew the basics:
- fresh water
- top quality guinea pig pellets
- dark, leafy greens
- no iceberg lettuce - ever
- small tidbits of fruit
- Vitamin C in their food or water
we decided to try something else. His little body was just not "behaving" like most guinea pigs' would.
Because I grow Moringa, and it is used in some countries for animal fodder, I thought it certainly wouldn't hurt anything, to feed him some. The only other time I had seen a rapid decline in health in any of our other guinea pigs, was when I was very, very young, and fed one of mine a lot of iceberg lettuce. She developed diarrhea - fast - and died. I learned my lesson.
I thought it would be easy to find references online, to people feeding their guinea pigs Moringa, but I was mistaken. Because it grows in the Philippines, in India, in Guam - just to name a few of the countries, and people there have guinea pigs, I expected to find references galore! I could not find any. There was no place that said people feed their guinea pigs Moringa - so I really was leery of giving him any of it. He was in such bad shape, though, I thought anything was worth a try. Almost fearfully, I tendered some fresh Moringa Oleifera leaves to our sick little guinea pig. He liked that - a lot! He ate them rapidly, and started to show a bit of interest in life. I then gave him some of our dried Moringa leaves. That was devoured, also - stems and all.
What I would like to know, is - does anyone else feed their guinea pigs Moringa?
