Baby guinea pig hand rearing?

Question
Ok well,one of my guinea pigs had babies recently,3 of them but one unfortunately died right after birth. Then the mom got sick,I didn't know what was wrong with here,she just wouldn't eat or drink and one of her eyes looked really bad. A few days later one of the 2 baby guinea pigs died and i don't know why :( and then the next day the mom died...So my question is that I have this one baby guinea pig left and I know they say to mix evaporated milk with cooled boiled water on a piece of bread,but I tried that and the baby guinea refuses to try it and I don't see it eating normal food either. Is there any special way to get it to drink the milk or do I have to force it? And would you happen to know what was wrong with the mommy guinea pig?

Answer

Teensy Weensy   The mother apparently got toxic after the delivery. It's a sad but too frequent part of raising cavies. If the mother was ill she wouldn't nurse the babies, so basically they died of dehydration. The baby that died right away was just one of those terrible statistics that happens in nearly every litter.

You can indeed hand raise the remaining baby. What you need is formula made specifically for baby animals, it has the colostrum in it that they need for their immunity. You can purchase this formula at nearly every pet store. It's a powdered formula. Just mix it according to the directions, but don't mix more than a very small amount at a time.

The best way to feed the baby is with a syringe. The trick is NOT to push the liquid into their mouths. You pull up some formula in the syringe along with a fairly good amount of air. They make a syringe for feeding baby puppies and kittens.

You can also get one at the drug store that's made for giving human babies medication.  It has a pointed end on it for putting in the mouth. Hopefully the baby will suck it on her own. With the air in the syringe it allows her to pull it out. Without air in the syringe it creates a vaccum and the baby can't suck hard enough to get it out.

The small baby bottles made for kittens has a rather large nipple. You can try that, but a cavy's nipples are very thin. The bottled nipples are too big for the tiny little mouth.

The thing you want to prevent is pushing the milk in too fast. Just little drips at a time so she won't aspirate into the lungs. You'll have to feed the baby every couple of hours, all night as well as all day. After they eat you need to stimulate the baby to urinate. You do this by gently wiping the genitals with a cotton ball to simulate the mother's licking.

In the wild these babies are very vulnerable, so nature has provided that they do not soil the nest to attract predators. Puppies and kittens are the same way. The mother licks them to make them go, then digests the droppings so there is nothing in the nest to dirty it or to smell.  Once they begin eating and drinking on their own the mother no longer does 'diaper duty.'

The concern now is whether the remaining baby has been without nutrition long enough to prevent her from recuperating. Evaporated milk doesn't have the necessary nutrients to sustain the baby, so you must get the puppy/kitten formula.

Don't let the baby take more than 1 cc at a time. Too much at once with give her a severe belly ache. It's tough, but it can be done. I've hand raised orphans successfully when I didn't have a lactating mother to foster them to.

Good luck to you. You can do this, it's an effort but not impossible. I've attached a picture of baby we had to hand raise. Fortunately she was aggressive enough to jump into the pile of foster babies she was with and would keep warm. Her foster mother did the diaper duty. If she had isolated herself from the pack she wouldn't have survived.

The syringe we used was a one cc syringe. The tip on it was part of an IV tubing from a butterfly needle. I cut the tubing to about 1/2 in long and screwed in on the syringe. It was the same size as the mother's nipple so she took it without problem. When my husband would open the cage door she would run to him and jump in his hand because she knew she would be fed.

She grew into a beautiful Himalayan and did her time on the show circuit before having a litter of her own.