Adventures in Guinea Sitting

From time to time when people go on vacation, they have people watch their pets, and this usually goes by without incident. This is not about those times.

We offered to watch my second cousins's, who are more like nieces to us, guinea pigs. They’re fairly easy to care for, just make sure they have food, water, and play with them for a bit. Easy. Piece of cake. No problem. And then the day the family leaves for a trip to Disneyland, one of them gets sick. So my partner is on the phone calling the mom, and then a small animal vet to make an appointment, which gets scheduled for the next day, fortunately with an online coupon for a free exam for first time visitors.

So, the next morning rolls around, and as I make the rounds with the various animals during feeding time, I open up the pigs’s cage to put in some celery and oranges and fill up their food dish with fresh food and put some Timothy hay in for them as well, when I notice that while the healthy pig immediately starts devouring what looks like a dried carrot, the other doesn’t want to move from her “house.” Fear sets in. So I quickly pet her head and she moves a little and makes a wheezing noise and blinks. Whew! At least she is still alive, and her appointment is only in a few hours.

Now, in the mean time, my partner has made me some delicious blueberry waffles, from scratch no less, for my birthday, because it just so happened to be that day, and I ate them and they were delicious. After breakfast, I went in to check on them and noticed that the sick one still hadn’t moved from earlier. Reaching into the cage, I gently pet her forehead. Nothing. So I quickly lift up her “home” to pick her up and she feels hard as a rock, and I knew what that meant. I called my partner into the room to show him, and he called the mom to tell her and the vet to cancel the appointment.

As a pet sitter, what are our responsibilities to this animal once it passes into the next realm? And as a parent on vacation at Disneyland no less, do you tell your child that her beloved pet has passed away there, or wait until you get home to tell her the bad news? What makes this especially difficult is this family had just lost a grandmother a couple days before leaving for this vacation. So many things go through your mind and you wonder if you made the right decision even calling in the first place to tell them the pig was sick, but in the end, it seems that hiding that fact until after the vacation would spoil the whole event. However, they decided to tell her, and inform her that she would have passed whether she was home or not, and that Granny must have needed some pets in heaven, which was the best decision. My partner is much better at communicating than I am, and I couldn’t have handled the situation the way that he did, and for that I am eternally grateful.

Today, I am going to look for a plant to put above her “grave” and when they get back, maybe we will have a little service for the little guinea pig. But I’m sure the grief will be short-lived, because the other pig is a little lonely and misses her friend, so a new pig might be in the picture soon after!