As some of you may recall, we got a guinea pig recently. We went and got her one of those “hamster balls.” It’s clear and when you put your pet in it, they supposedly run around having just oodles of fun. Well, little Loki just doesn’t seem to get the idea. She’s very active when in her cage or on our laps, but she doesn’t seem to be able to figure out what to do with this ball. Any ideas how to help her? I really think she’d enjoy it if she’d get the hang of it. We don’t want to force the issue, but we’ve put her in there once a day for just over a week and she just sits there staring at us like we’re lunatics.
Try giving the ball a good sharp kick.
Damn, beat me to it Nu Vo! 
Put some Gerbil pellets in front of the ball, see if she goes for 'em?
Jeannie - Just try gently pushing the ball until he or she realizes they can go places. Another idea is to place a favorite treat close by where it can be seen. Perhaps it will coax the guinnea to try to get to it.
chase her 
worked with my mice
Feline.
Yeah, you’re going to have to put the idea in the beast’s head. Most of us mammals aren’t as intuitive as some people like to think.
No, that’s wrong–try this:
Party per bend sinister wavy bendy sinister wavy vert & or, & sable, in fess point a demi-pellet en soleil inverted & bendwise sinister issuant from the party, in sinister base a roundel bendy sinister wavy vert & or.
I had a rat once. The cage I had came with a hamster ball, but she would refuse to even go inside the thing. Once, she even bit me when I tried to put her in. Ever been bitten by a rat? Not fun. I wound up giving the ball to my sister for her hamster. True to form, she dropped it and it broke. I could swear I heard a cheer coming from the rat cage, though I might have been mistaken.
In short, hamster balls are not for strong-willed creatures like rats. You should be glad you have a guinea pig.
P.S. This thread would have gotten a much bigger response if you had titled it “Hamster Balls”.
Heck is where you go when you don’t believe in Gosh.
- and FINALLY, I understand that Gary Larson strip with the “cow ball”.
Thank you, thank you, thank you!
Norman
Get a cat. Introduce the cat to the guinea pig while in the ball. Watch guinea pig run like hell.
Two words:
Hamster bowling
Voted Best Sport
And narrowly averted the despised moniker Smiley Master
Forward deployed until 18AUG00
My friend’s hamster was cruising merrily up and down the hallway in its hamster ball when the telephone rang. My friend, in her eagerness to grab the telephone, accidentally kicked the ball which careened sideways down the hall and bounced down the stairs. My friend had picked up the phone by the time she realized what she had done, and shouted into the phone:
“Hang on! I just kicked my hamster in his balls!”
We were laughing so hard that we could barely check on the little critter, who was just fine. I don’t know who was on the phone.
Canine works as well as feline. We couldn’t leave our hamsters or gerbil alone with the dog because she loved to run up to the ball and give it a whack.
“I hope life isn’t a big joke, because I don’t get it,” Jack Handy
I keep visualizing a fancy party with all the little hamsters in formal dress…
:eek:
I am a redhead, you see, and I do not tempt. I insist. -Cristi
Jeannie, I just had this identical conversation with my sister a while ago. Deja vu, or something, huh?
Here is a fact: a hamster is not a guinea pig. Duh. :rolleyes:
Here is what it means in actual practice.
Hamsters are native to the Syrian desert, where food is scarce. In order to find enough food, hamsters (which are nocturnal and solitary) can travel literally for miles every night, returning to the home burrow to sleep all day. This is why hamsters need wheels to exercise on, when they’re kept in captivity. If they don’t run laps every night, they get sick.
Guinea pigs are native to the forests and grasslands of South America. They are fairly slow-moving critters, preferring to depend on excellent eyesight and camouflage to hide in the grass from predators. They eat grass, which is all around them; they don’t need to move around much.
They were kept in captivity by the Incas, who used them as a food source for hundreds of years. They let them run around on the floor of their homes. Guinea pigs are naturally very social and slow-moving, so they were very happy to hang around, eating scraps that were tossed to them. However, the trade-off for allowing yourself to be domesticated, is that every so often, one of you gets eaten. When meat was wanted for the stewpot, the resident Inca would scoop up as many as were required and cook them. Any guinea pigs that bit or scratched or were otherwise anti-social, would of course have been weeded out of the gene pool right away. Pick one up, it bites you–“whoa, you’re dinner!”
And of course, any guinea pigs that tried to escape from the hut and get back into the forest would have had to run out in the open, past a gauntlet of predators, including (but not limited to), Incas, village dogs, and various wild predators, cats, hawks, etc. Remember guinea pigs cannot run very fast.
The ones that carried the genes for boldness and exploration would be picked off, removed from the domestic gene pool. The ones that demonstrated traits like a reluctance to leave the relative safety of the hut would continue to breed.
This all means that today’s pet guinea pig is a happy, quiet, sociable critter who would prefer to sit in one place and eat grass all day. He does not need to run around, whether in a plastic ball or on a hamster wheel. If you give a guinea pig a hamster wheel or a plastic runaround ball, he is puzzled. Nothing in his genes has prepared him for the possibilities inherent in a hamster wheel. It’s like giving a pair of gloves to an alien with no fingers.
I am sorry you got stuck buying a hamster ball. Maybe you can give it to someone else.
Or you can always get a hamster, to use it.