Welcome to Tiny Cages

Welcome to Tiny Cages, a blog dedicated to animals and stopping the abuse of them. In this blog, I'll be sharing animal facts, pictures, and videos, and charities, as well. 

Animal abuse can be well camouflaged and hard to spot. Like PetCo shows frequently, animal abuse can also be brushed aside easily, supposed to be forgotten. This blog is here to try and show that animal abuse can't be ignored or forgotten, and that it is never okay, no matter how eloquent the person denying it may be.

I've gone to the same PetCo many, many times, and only recently have I looked at their rodents section, which is pretty disgusting. There were so many rats packed into one very small cage, and while they didn't look very unhealthy, they didn't look very healthy, either. The guinea pig cage was pretty appalling, as well. Any guinea pig lover can tell you that even if you have just one, guinea pigs need a lot of space, so they can run around and popcorn (a way of expressing happiness for guinea pigs). They had two guinea pigs in a cage so small they could barely walk, much less run. And all the cages looked pretty gross. There was poop on the food bowls, and the cage just felt grimy. And if you go two or three days in a row, or possibly even more, you may notice the cages look exactly the same as they did yesterday.

When I told an employee there that the guinea pig cages were way too small, she told me rather rudely that it was very temporary and made a face at me, quite plainly trying to rush me out. True, at other PetCo's I've gone to, the employees were friendlier than that one, but they all pretty much said the same thing - that it was very temporary, that they were only in there for a week. Here's my argument for why I don't like that answer:

For a guinea pig, time is not the same as it is for humans. That's why people say, after a beloved animal has passed after a few years, that they lived a long life - because it's true. Not for us, but for them. To a rat, two years is sixty years old (give or take). So while to us, they lived for a very short time, to them, they lived a long and happy life. So putting a guinea pig in a small cage for only a week is not a good argument, because a human week is seven days, but a guinea pig week could be months or so. And even if time was the same for humans and other animals, imagine if someone put you in a box you couldn't really move around in for only a week. You'd know you were getting out, but wouldn't it be terrible to not be able to run around, exercise, express happiness in your own way, even if it's for just a week?

If you want to tell or ask me anything, e-mail me at tinycages@gmail.com.