Last Updated on: 1st August 2020, 04:28 pm
I know this is old, but it’s an excuse to tell a silly story.
A few months ago, I heard about a ton of guinea pigs getting dumped in a park. At the time, Steve and I asked why someone would do that, and I immediately thought of the song above. I’m pretty sure guinea pigs can breed about as fast as rabbits, and sometimes people don’t know they have a female and a male until…they have many guinea pigs. I wonder if rabbits and guinea pigs were the inspiration for the Tribbles from Star Trek.
I was also surprised there was a guinea pig sanctuary. Did they create it to rescue all the unplanned guinea pigs that came into being?
Thankfully the only guinea pig experience I had was with having one guinea pig, so I never had the misfortune of suddenly having many of them. But I did figure out how much one guinea pig could chew.
A long time ago, I took a guinea pig off a friend’s hands. Her name was Bella. My friend told me what Bella loved to eat, she told me that if I was holding her, I should put her on a towel because she was a poop machine. But she never warned me that while holding her, she would nibble my hair. Maybe this was because this friend was smarter than I was, and tied her hair back when holding Bella.
Bella and I were getting along well. I loved her squeaky squealy noises she would make in the morning and whenever someone would come into the room. Cleaning her giant glass tank thing was no fun, and Steve had to help me move it so I could clean it, but whatever. I would hold her and pet her and she would sit there squeaking and cooing and making those guinea pig noises, and kind of gnawing on my hair. I would giggle and not think much of it.
Then one day, my mom asked me where I got such an atrocious haircut. I raised my eyebrows and named the hair place down the road where I’d always gone. She really wanted to march down there and give them a piece of her mind, and it took a lot of persuading to keep her from doing it.
A little while later, I suddenly took a closer look at my hair and went “holy crap, one side really is shorter than the other!” I realized with horror that that was the side that the guinea pig had been nibbling on. I was very thankful that my mom hadn’t chewed out the people at the hair place, because it wasn’t their fault, and I was going to have to now go crawling to them and hope they could fix it.
As I walked down the street, I wondered how I would explain the state I found myself in. I couldn’t think of a quick thing I could say while they stared at my hair, with one side drastically shorter than the other. When I walked into the shop, it felt like all conversation stopped. It was like I walked into an old movie scene where the guy comes into the saloon and everyone stops and stares. But this wasn’t the saloon, it was the salon and I knew the reason for the silence. All I could sputter out was “Help me!”
After I explained what happened, we had a good laugh and she straightened out the mess that was my head. I was much more careful about where I held Bella after that.
So if you find yourself thinking about guinea pigs for pets, only get one, and tie back your hair when holding them!