Help! My guinea pig won't stop wheeking!

Hi, humans, Lola here.

I'm cute. 

I'm going to do you a big favor and save you for weeks of headache, sleep loss and misery and explain something that will help you understand why your guinea pig might be wheeking in the middle of the night. 

You see, a few weeks ago, the humans decided that because the weather has been getting warmer, it would be a good idea to turn on the air conditioning unit in the living room. At night, they'd turn it on, feed us, and go to sleep in the human room (that one room of the apartment we are not allowed to enter).

Everything good so far, right? Wrong. The A/C makes a low humming sound that has been driving us absolutely bonkers. Nuts. Insane in the piggie membrane. We try to put up with it, but we can't sleep, and so on behalf of the rest of the guinea pigs I wheek and scream as loud as I can.

The humans wake up. Groggy, they stagger to our cage and throw some pellets our way. They check our water. They give is hay. The pellets usually distract me for a bit because, come on, pellets are awesome.

But they never address the root of the problem. And so we wheek again an hour later.

"What do you want from me?!" the humans plead. "Why are you doing this to me? I just want to sleep through the night without being woke up!!"

Yeah, well so would we! But that air conditioner is driving us crazy, and we can't sleep with it on! 

You would not believe how long it took the humans to realize what we've spent weeks trying to communicate to them. Stupid humans.

Anyway, now that they see how much we hate the sound of the air conditioner, they thankfully have learned to turn it off at night. Finally, we (all) can get some sleep.

Can Guinea Pigs Eat Passion fruit?

Passion fruit (aka passionfruit) is a strange fruit. The outer shell is inedible, and the inner part is edible seeds surrounded by fruity goop, kind of like horned melon. According to the Happy Cavy blog, passion fruit is safe for us to eat. It is pretty sweet, so we're guessing this should only be an occasional treat.

I don't like the way passion fruit looks. It's like something out of a horror movie!

Wow, it's sweet and tangy! I don't care how it looks after all!

Although we loved horned melon and gave it five stars, passion fruit is not the same thing. Sure, it smells and tastes great at first, but the seeds in passion fruit are a lot crunchier. We like crunchy when it comes to our treats, but not hidden away in the middle of tasty fruit goop like some mean prank. Humans, if you're willing to pick out all the seeds, we might be willing to raise our rating; until then, passion fruit only gets 2/5 stars.

Can Guinea Pigs Eat Pepino Melon?

The humans did it again and stumped our favorite food chart. Pepino Melon is not listed anywhere on it, nor could we find it on the guinea pig web forums. Wikipedia says pepino melon is related to eggplant and tomato, which we can eat, so pepino melon is probably safe, too. Still, you probably want to exercise caution and feed us small portions and only occasionally until more information is available.
.

NOM NOM NOM

MOAR??

We give pepino melon 4/5 stars!

Can Guinea Pigs Eat Thai Eggplant?

We guinea pigs ate eggplant before, but never these strange little round eggplants the humans found for us.

Thai eggplant, you say? I thought it was a tomatillo.

Despite how different it looks, Thai eggplant is just another variety of eggplant, so like with regular eggplant, it should be okay in moderation (1-2 times per week).

Yum!

Humans, can we get a refill?

It tastes just as good as regular eggplant, so it gets the same rating: 4/5 stars!

Can Guinea Pigs Eat Okra?

Okra is not listed on our favorite chart, so we had to check the forums of the guinea pig websites to find out if it's safe for us to eat. People said that it can be fed to us one piece a couple times per week, but we may not like it. We're not going to let ourselves be deterred by the bad experiences of other pigs, however. We're willing to risk not liking it and having our humans clean up the mess.

Let me at it!

This is good! I don't know why those other guinea pigs didn't like it.

Oh. Now I see why they didn't like it.

Okra played a dirty trick on us. It tasted good at first, but then it turned slimy in our mouths. We all ignored it from that point on and started furiously eating hay. Okra gets 2/5 stars, and that's being generous.

Can Guinea Pigs Eat Fennel?

Fennel is only listed on our favorite list of safe foods as a forage food. However, the guinea pig forum and guinea pig cages forum say it's okay to feed us fennel "now and again."

The three of us gather around to eat the fennel...

Hey! The humans wanted us to share that, Lola!

Fennel is tasty, and it smells nice. It's so flavorful, in fact, that we had trouble getting it back from Lola after she had a taste. We'll give fennel 5/5 stars.

Product Review: Kaytee Timothy Hay Plus Cranberries

The Hayloft hay is taking longer than expected to arrive, so the humans got us a couple more of Kaytee's novelty hays to tide us over. How many flavors of hay can they make? I bet after these two, we'll have tried them all, but who knows?

This time, we're reviewing Kaytee Timothy Hay Plus Cranberries. The last time we tried cranberries, we found them really intense and flavorful, so we're interested to try this hay.

Kaytee sure makes a lot of different novelty hays.

Mmm... Seed-heads...

All the seed-heads belong to me, Broccoli!

There weren't a lot of cranberries in this hay, but that's just as well since dried fruit tends to have a lot of sugar. As with all the Kaytee hays we've tried, the hay is a little coarse, but there's a good number of seed-heads, which are our favorite part. We'll give Kaytee Timothy Hay Plus Cranberries 3/5 stars.