strange behaviour

Question
hi there, i have a 17 month old female guinea pig. she is in very good health loves her food etc. yesterday i noticed she was acting strange. she was pushing herself around on the floor on her side. she was getting in the corners of the cage on her side with one of her back legs up in the air and pushing it back and forth. she seems to be pushing her tummy muscles and then i noticed a small amount of cream coloured discharge being squirted out of her. she done this for a while a few times then got back up and had some food and went back into her house. she has been acting normal since then, eating and drinking fine. she has a sisiter she lives with and she was following her around sniffing her and seemed to be being protective over her.
i was just wondering , can guinea pigs have phantom pregnancies ? or is this signs of something more serious ?
await your reply.
many thanks.

Answer

stone Yes, guinea pigs can have phantom pregnancies. I've had pigs that gave me every indication they were pregnant, then one day just said, "Forget it." And all the symptoms went away.

However this behavior sounds like a pain response. The first thing that comes to mind is if she was passing a kidney or bladder stone. We don't know why kidney stones form. There are a lot of theories but no solid proof. If it were a stone you would see the discharge you describe. Usually there's a small amount of blood with it as the stone tears the ureter and the urethra. They can be very small and still cause big pain.

In all my years of breeding I've only had one pig that had a stone. It was so large the animal had to be euthanized. Attached is a picture of the stone. Although fairly rare, they do occur. Or perhaps they occur more frequently than we know and the animal just passes it and moves on.

If she's acting, feeding, drinking and eliminating normally now then the crisis is probably over. You might want to use bottle water on her rather than tap. In humans it's believed that the minerals in tap water may cause stones. I had a cat that had that problem and the bottle water helped eliminate it.

I can't think of anything else that might have caused what you saw.  Hopefully this is the end of it.