Product Review: Oxbow Harvest Stacks Western Timothy Hay with Carrots

This product was a gift from Santa, so I hope we like it. Otherwise, we might seem ungrateful. Santa seems to know us pretty well, though; we generally love Oxbow products, so this is a pretty safe bet.

Although these things look like guinea pig birthday cakes, they are marketed as an alternative way to feed your piggy hay. It claims to produce less dust than loose hay, and to be a good option for traveling or if you have limited space. (One person said they could see using it in their hurricane evacuation kit.) They come in three types: Western Timothy, Western Timothy with Chamomile, and Western Timothy with Carrots (which is the kind we're trying).

What is that? Some sort of a giant treat? Feed it to us now! Wheek! Wheek!

According to the package, the humans were actually supposed to pull on opposite ends of this thing to form an S-shape before feeding it to us. We were too excited to try it to allow the humans to stop and read the package's instructions, however!

This is fun to chew on!

In case you're concerned about us getting too much carrots in our diet from this thing, you probably don't need to worry. The ingredients say it's 97% timothy grass hay, and only 3% dried carrots. Just enough to make it extra-tasty!

Someone is late to the party.

We really like this stuff. We actually got into a few fights over who gets control of the hay stack. We can definitely see a need for this product when you need to travel somewhere, or as Oxbow puts it, to "supplement with loose hay to encourage enrichment." However, we have a tendency to drag this thing around the cage through our own waste products, so we're concerned that it will eventually become inedible. In addition, these things were $13 for 35 ounces (a little over 2 pounds) of hay, compared to $40 for 20 pounds of hay from Small Pet Select. You can be sure your human will start grumbling about money if you were to try to switch to this stuff completely! Still, as a hay supplement and traveling substitute, we'll give this product 5/5 stars!