Which food

[kiz]

Hi I have been an occasional visitor over the years. I have two gos both about 7 years old. They have always been happy on Guinea pig excel food with the occasional monkey nut, middle leaves of celery, pasta occasionally. They seem to have become fussy. Only eating their preferred bits from their guinea pig food. They leave the black pellets the flat yellow and green bits and a lot of the seeds. Are they just becoming spoilt? They always seem hungry and search through their bowl of food eagerly enough. I thought it might be a teeth problem at first but they love the biscuit bits in their mix and their monkey nuts and they are all hard foods. I got them some hay cookies which they hardly touched. They love the dandelion leaf mix that you can get from pet shops. Is there a food any one could suggest which doesn't have the black bits in it. My hamster leaves the black bits in his bowl as well... regards Kim

[abirose]

Hi,

Your goos are doing something called "selective feeding" its pretty common when animals have a muesli style food they pick out all the best bits which means there not getting all the good stuff they need. We kind of promote moving away from guinea pig foods because there are better degu specialised foods. To prevent selective feeding there are nugget based foods which stop the pickyness but the problem is that you don't want to change the diet to quickly or it will upset their tummys.

I would suggest slowly adding nugget food and adding more natural food (we have a lot of information about natural nutrition on here and the dandelion mix would be a good part of it as well as herbs seeds and dried flowers and veg) and over a course of a few weeks slowly reduce and then take out the guinea pig food. This will result in your goos getting the right vitamins and nutrition