Tricks For Guinea Pigs: Great Employment Opportunity
The guinea pig is a very intelligent and docile rodent. If you always reward them for their efforts, they will learn quickly and master various tricks for guinea pigs.
The guinea pig is not only intelligent and docile, but also very personable. It should always be rewarded for its efforts.
It should also be emphasized that guinea pigs are relatively easy to care for pets as they don’t take up too much space and are easy to keep busy.
Try the following tricks for guinea pigs :
Guinea pigs are great pets: friendly, communicative, and grateful. Your intelligence and ability to learn is often underestimated: You love to learn new things and understand a lot more than many people think.
With a lot of patience and a clear understanding of what can be taught them, they can learn amazing tricks for guinea pigs.
You should know how to reward their progress: Guinea pigs are pure herbivores and love lettuce or parsley.
However, too much lettuce or parsley can be harmful and lead to indigestion and even poisoning when you are done with the exercises.
Before you start training your guinea pigs, find out which treats they like best. Choose a food that they can easily and safely eat and that you can feed in small pieces.
Each of your guinea pigs has their own taste, so the first thing to do is figure out which tidbits will motivate them to learn.
Tricks for guinea pigs
First, you need to figure out what tricks for guinea pigs you are going to teach them in the first place.
Order them in ascending order from the easiest to the most difficult: always start with the easy ones and watch how the difficulty increases little by little.
When you have found a suitable trick to start with, break it down into smaller learning units: It is much more efficient to teach guinea pigs tricks one by one instead of doing the whole trick from the start.
Reward your guinea pigs every time they do something right, at exactly the right time. Don’t be too slow or too fast or they won’t understand why they are being rewarded.
If they don’t understand you, they won’t know what to do and won’t make any progress.
Think of a separate command for each trick so that the tricks for guinea pigs can be differentiated.
The command should have two to three syllables for each trick and be clearly different from the others. Never try to teach them two different guinea pig tricks under the same command.
First, give the command and then guide your guinea pig directly to the trick. After several attempts it will have learned that it should do the trick on this command.
Under no circumstances should you punish your guinea pigs if something goes wrong! Just do the exercise again: mistakes are part of the learning process.
Don’t scold them or get upset: Tricks and other pursuits are a game, not an obligation.
If the animal does not want to learn or is not interested in employment, it must not be forced to do so.
To sit up and beg
There are many tricks you can teach your guinea pig. The simplest of them is making males. The guinea pig should stand on its hind legs.
Pick up a treat. Bring this close to the guinea pig’s face and gradually lift it up so that your guinea pig follows the delicacy and stands on its hind legs.
The first few times you reward it when it takes its front legs off the ground. Then you wait until it gets up a little more and finally sits up fully in order to get the reward.
Do not forget to give the previously selected command (eg “male” or “stand”) before it stands up.
Keep in mind that when you give the command, the guinea pig is supposed to do the trick, not when you raise your hand with the treat.
The 360 ° rotation
Turning on yourself once is another easy trick you can teach your guinea pigs to do.
Here, too, you use a tidbit to learn: At nose level or lower (on the floor) you slowly move your hand around the animal so that it follows the reward and turns around itself.
First you say the command you selected again and then get your guinea pig to turn around itself.
Don’t reward it after a full spin at the beginning. Go a little further with each attempt. If it has made a couple of full spins, you will only reward it at the end of the spin.
After a few tries, your guinea pigs should have learned not to turn until given the command.
However , each animal learns at its own pace, so it may take a few repetitions to understand what to do.
Run zigzag
For this trick you have to prepare a course first.
You have to build a surface on which four or five vertical pillars or small cones stand as an obstacle.
Leave a gap of at least four inches between the pillars: this will ensure that your guinea pig can walk between them without touching them or knocking them over.
The method is similar to the previous tricks: give the chosen command and lead the animal in a zigzag around the pillars. Do not do the whole row at once, but gradually increase the level of difficulty.
When doing this exercise, make sure to always start from the same side: it makes a big difference for animals to go around an obstacle on the left or right.
There are so many great guinea pig tricks that you can teach them with patience. With a little imagination, you can come up with your own and break each trick down into simpler parts.
There are guinea pigs who can put objects in a basket and others who can jump through a hoop or push a miniature shopping cart…. Others can even shake hands.
Much of learning tricks for guinea pigs depends on your patience and the ability to adapt to your guinea pigs’ learning pace and skills.
It also depends a little on a reward worth striving for. Don’t be afraid to try anything you can think of as long as you and your guinea pigs enjoy it.
