Kleenmama Hayloft Hay for Guinea Pigs Review

Up until now, the humans have primarily fed us Oxbow hay. We love it. It has a great percentage of seed heads to crunchy green stalks. But at around $10 for bag, it is rather expensive. Petco's brand of Natural Premium Timothy Hay is less expensive, but it is not as tasty. It's more yellow than green and has fewer seed heads and we just don't like it as much as Oxbow. 

But we go through a bag of hay per week, so the humans began exploring more economical ways to keep us well fed. Guinea pigs need unlimited, unrestricted access to fresh hay. Hay is really the most important part of our diet, and choosing the right hay for your budget and piggies is a task worth exploring.

We heard great things about Kleenmama hay (now called Hayloft) from other guinea pigs. Even with shipping, this hay cost way less than any other hay out there, and it comes right to your door. We had high hopes for this hay, and we were very excited when the 15lb box of second cut timothy hay arrived at our pigloo door.

But for the first two weeks, we really didn't know what to make of it. It was bright green and clearly fresh, though it did have fewer seed heads. It was just very different from the pet store hay we were used to eating. We honestly did not like it very much at first. We wheeked and pushed the hay around our cage. We didn't eat it and the humans began to worry about us.

New hay!

Hmmm... 

In fact, Buffy lost 30 grams over those two weeks and Lola lost 27 grams. While guinea pig weights can vary due to a number of different factors, losing this much weight and not eating much of the hay was worrisome.

After about two weeks, we realized that this new hay was not going to hurt us, and we began to eat it up more enthusiastically. We gained back some of the weight we lost. We are starting to like Hayloft hay more and more each day.

But you know what? This isn't Hayloft's fault. Astute readers will notice what our humans did wrong: rather than introduce this new alien hay bit by bit into our diet, they cut off our supply of our usual hay all at once and just started feeding us this strange new hay out of the blue. What they should have done is introduce it gradually into our diet. Start out by mixing 75% old, familiar hay and 25% new hay, then increase it to 50/50, then 75/25, and finally switch to 100% of the new product. That would have been less of a shock to our systems. I guess they were just too excited about the new hay to remember to do it.

So in conclusion, we will be asking our humans for Hayloft hay from now on. We may even wish to experiment with first and third cut hay types!

(Because the humans messed up, we're going to hold off of rating Hayloft hay for now. We feel we haven't given it a fair trial yet.)