This article first appeared on RTL.de.
What a tumult! That’s what Cid Dwyer (25) was thinking when he bought a new house in Sydney, Australia, last year. The previous owner left him his ten guinea pigs without saying a word. Instead of giving them up, Cid decides to take care of the animals. But then all of a sudden the females have children – and the turmoil takes on unimagined proportions.
“I just thought, ‘They’re cute, I’ll let them hang out here,'” says Cid, looking back on his spontaneous adoption of the guinea pigs in 2022. As the “SWNS” news agency reports, the previous owner of his new house didn’t say a word about the animals mentioned. And at first he hardly had any problems with them, according to Cid. Until one morning he found not ten but 14 guinea pigs in the garden. One of the females had children!
“I was shocked,” the Australian told SWNS. As a total guinea pig layman, Cid was initially unable to tell the males and females apart and separate them from each other. Although he puts up fences and two separate enclosures, one particularly passionate piggy always manages to get to his heart’s end seeds. Within a year, the guinea pig population in Cid’s garden exploded: the original ten animals grew to 80.
Meanwhile, Cid has the birth rate under control in the enclosure and spends a lot of time with his furry friends in the large garden. He grows barley grass himself for the animals, spoils the little pigs with watermelons and carrots and of course has given each four-legged friend a name. “One of them is called ‘Curious George’ because he’s very curious,’ says Cid. And ‘Cookie Dough’, which looks like a cookie with chocolate flakes, is one of his favorites.
The shaggy extended family has only one catch: they eat and eat and eat. Every week, Cid spends 130 euros just on food. Together with the vet visits and vaccinations, his expenses for the guinea pigs amount to around 9,000 euros a year.
“They are very spoiled,” admits Cid. “But they have a nice life.” And that’s what really matters.
