Guano Pigs

Kinkajou poop.

You probably don’t think about it on the daily. But you would if you were a volunteer at Philly’s Academy of Natural Science like I was in the ‘90s.

Picture cleaning the cage of an animal who eats nothing but fruit. Kinkajous are frugivores whose poop has the sweet smell of fruit, and yet… with an underlying poopiness.

Now think about rodents that eat mainly straw. You give them hay, and they give back tiny, uniform poop pellets. Their pee smells like hay, if you can imagine the sweet, fresh smell of hay, except, urine. Grass in, grass out.

By the machinations of destiny, I suddenly acquired two rescue guinea pigs. The black-haired one who eats a lot, I named Nick Frost. The skinny blond who runs a lot I named Simon Pegg. (I am not stooping to the low-hanging “Pigg” pun.) Go watch any of those actors’ movies, and you’ll see why the names fit.

Guinea-pig owners are giddy with joy about having these porgs (to borrow a term from Star Wars) in their homes, and will reel out stories showing why you too should absolutely get a pair. From what I’d heard, I thought that guinea pigs were wee, low-maintenance smolbois. So adorable! So cuddly! It turns out that nope.

First of all, this is an animal that runs around pissing and shitting indiscriminately, even where it eats. I thought they would pile their effluence in a corner, like other mammals. No. This is a prey animal that, for reasons unknown, broadcasts its smelly signposts to any possible predator that might be around.

See, guinea pigs are like clown cars: they’re so small, and yet, surreal amounts of stuff come out of them. Put a little hay in their hut, and soon their whole habitat will be awash in dung as if they were wingless geese. Sure, go ahead and build them a big, beautiful enclosure. In a few hours, everything inside will be flipped over and covered in obscene filth like some tenth circle of Hell.

Second, they have a hair trigger and will pop off at the least disturbance. Anything will startle them, and startling them makes them rocket around their enclosure like slot cars. Despite my treating them like Lord Fauntleroy, they run like hell every time I approach them, and God forbid I try to pick them up, they scream like they’re being murdered. Whenever I so much as glance at them, they recoil in a manner which can only be described as insulting. I don’t think they are actually afraid of me; I think they just like drama and are mocking me.

So therefore, they are not unfailingly cuddly no matter what anyone tries to tell you. If they are not in the mood for you, well then, you can just fuck right off. The whole “pets = love” paradigm doesn’t apply here. Porgs habitually make a rumbling sound which can mean either “I love you” or “Get away from me,” and you have no way of knowing which is intended at any given moment, because they have expressionless, wall-eyed faces.

Third, I lied about them eating just hay. They actually require an additional cornucopia of fresh vegetables. Buddy, I myself don’t even get that kind of nutrition in my diet. Now I go shopping with a whole-ass instruction chart breaking down which produce is allowed once a week, twice a week, once a month—the chart is bigger than the Periodic Table. And you also have to get treats, to buy their affection when they are cranky.

With a diet of fresh produce and scientifically engineered treats and bushels of hay, you can already guess that these critters cost money, but guess what else. They eat their toys and furniture. Yes, eat. You have to keep buying more.

And, if you don’t want your home to smell like a dive-bar toilet, but also don’t want to be doing laundry all day, you will have to shell out for a never-ending influx of wee-wee pads. And changing those wee-wee pads whenever they become intolerable takes time, and time is money. Guinea pigs cost more per ounce than cocaine.

Don’t try to cheap out of it by buying only one porg, either; these are social animals who will suffer if they’re alone. Plus, they require a lot of play and stimulation. You can’t just incarcerate them in a box until the odd moment when you feel like noticing them. Don’t picture them in a teeny, little habitat in a discreet corner of your home—porgs need space to sprint and dart and run long distances. No matter how chic your living room is, it will soon be littered with cage extensions, toys, and random hay, like some kind of farm run by toddlers.

For another thing, even though they look like potatoes, they are actually much dumber. Despite their epic proficiency at turning any space into a pee-sodden turd-town, they are not very good at anything else. After hanging out with them, I have to refresh myself by talking to my cats, who are basically idiots, but seem brilliant in comparison.

All these complaints have a purpose; I am not simply on a rant. I am trying to get the word out that the cult of “piggie parents” is trying to sell you a bill of goods. (I refuse to say “sell you a pig in a poke.”) Do not prance out to Petco thinking you are going to get a fun toy-like buddy. Think twice. Ask yourself how much money you can spend, and how much sewage you can stand having in your living room.

I am a maniacal enough animal lover that I will tolerate a lot—I mean, there I was cleaning animal cages for free in Philly. So I am actually kind of okay with this whole scenario; I rescued Nick and Simon from a situation, and I will stand by them forever.

But the reason why I had to rescue them is that there are so many misconceptions about how fun and easy porgs are to raise, that people buy them, get the wake-up call, then dump them. There are whole rodent-rescue shelters out there for this reason. Dumping any animal of any kind is criminal, and if scaring readers out of buying one prevents that from happening, I’m fine with that.

So, guinea pigs suck; don’t get any.

(Even though they are pretty damn cute.)