What Treats Can Guinea Pigs Eat?

Fresh vegetables, leafy greens and the odd piece of fruit are the treats guinea pigs take, with hay underneath all of it. A guinea pig will wheek at the sound of the fridge door, and that is the trade off: the animal asks loudly, so overdoing it is easy.

Fresh foods guinea pigs eat

The Merck Veterinary Manual and VCA Hospitals both build a guinea pig's diet on grass hay, with fresh vegetables added each day and fruit kept occasional. Treats come from the same fridge drawer. A slice of cucumber, a leaf of romaine, a few strands of cilantro or a strip of bell pepper is a treat a guinea pig can finish in a minute.

Cut it to the width of your finger and the length of your thumb, since a strip is easier to hold than a cube. Rinse it, pat it dry, and take away what has not been eaten by evening, because cut vegetables turn quickly in a warm room.

Wash everything, even a vegetable you are about to peel. Introduce a new food by itself, a day or two before the next, so you know which one the guinea pig took to. A short notebook page beside the fridge, with the date and the food, makes that easy to remember.

The fridge door has its own ritual in a house with a guinea pig. The animal hears the seal break and answers from across the room, and you learn quickly whether you have time to serve or only to answer. Keep a small lidded box with the day's pieces already cut, and the ritual takes ten seconds.

Hay based treats and chews

Hay is the food, and hay shaped into a treat is still hay. Compressed hay cubes, hay sticks and woven grass chews are sold for gnawing, and they keep a guinea pig busy longer than a leaf does. Check the ingredient line: it should name hay or grass and little else. Willow and apple wood sticks are sold for the same job and should read as plain wood, with no dye or flavor.

The guinea pig treats collection is the place to look on this site. The range is small today and grows as makers join, so what you see is what is on offer now.

Chews last longer than leaves, and that is the trade off with them: they keep a guinea pig busy, and they are still food. A hay cube that goes down in a single sitting counts as a meal's worth of hay, not as a toy. Watch which kind your guinea pig works at and which it ignores, and buy more of the first.

Dried fruit, sparingly

Dried fruit has had its water taken out and its sugar left in, so a piece carries more sugar per gram than the fresh fruit it came from. Cut a dried piece to the size of your smallest fingernail and treat it as a once in a while food, not a daily one. Merck Veterinary Manual and VCA Hospitals both place fruit in the occasional column.

Hold the piece against your fingertip to see it at its true size. A whole dried apricot or apple ring is a large object next to a small animal, and tearing one into six is not unkind. Offer a piece after the hay and the vegetables, and put the rest of the bag back in the cupboard.

If a guinea pig begs for it every time you open the cupboard, that tells you it likes the piece and nothing about how much it should have.

What Merck says about vitamin C

Merck states that guinea pigs cannot produce their own vitamin C and need to get it from their diet, and VCA says the same in its guinea pig feeding page. Both pages are worth reading in full, because how much a guinea pig needs is their subject and not ours.

As a food example, USDA FoodData Central lists raw red bell pepper at about 128 milligrams of vitamin C per 100 grams, which works out to about 12.8 milligrams in a 10 gram strip by the same USDA figure. Weigh a strip on a kitchen scale once and you will know what 10 grams looks like.

That figure is a raw weight for one food, and it is there to show the shape of the arithmetic. A pepper strip is a treat with a published figure behind it, where a dried fruit chip comes with only a picture on the bag. When you read a guinea pig pellet or mix, treat the label's own statements as the maker's, and take the sources above for the rest.

Sniff and Shift makes freeze dried and air dried treats for dogs and cats only, so none of the house line is suggested for a guinea pig. A rabbit shares the hay but not the whole list; what treats can rabbits eat covers that animal, and treats for small pets sorts every small animal at once.

Common questions

Can guinea pigs eat grapes?

Grapes are fruit, and Merck Veterinary Manual and VCA Hospitals both place fruit in the occasional column. Cut one grape into small pieces and offer a single piece at a time.

Can guinea pigs eat the treats made for rabbits?

Read the label first, because a treat made for rabbits is built around a rabbit. Merck builds a guinea pig's diet on grass hay, with fresh vegetables daily and fruit only as a treat, so a rabbit treat made of seed or fruit is a poor fit. A treat that is only hay or a dried herb is the closer match.

How many treats a day can a guinea pig have?

No source we trust gives a single number that fits every guinea pig. Offer one small piece at a time and keep hay and the regular food as the main meal. If your guinea pig starts ignoring hay, treats have come first.

Why does my guinea pig wheek when I open the fridge?

Guinea pigs learn the sounds that come before food, and a fridge door is one of them. The wheek is a request, and you can answer it with a handful of hay as easily as with a treat.