I do not need to be dealing with this

This is the face of evil.



Sure, she looks all innocent and cuddly, but she's not. Well, she is if you're a human. If you're a human and you go to pick her up she'll skitter about the cage while you reach for her, but once she's in your arms she's as sweet as pie. Snuggles right into your arms and chirps what you can only assume are endearments.

Just as adorable as can be.

BUT. If you are her cage mate, a sweet little Beta pig who welcomed you after the untimely death of her Alpha, who taught you what it means when that big silver box in the kitchen opens, and what the rustling of a plastic bag might foretell (hint: they both involve lettuce), and how to stand at the front of the cage and beg .... if you are that pig, THIS is how you are repaid.


It looks particularly bad at the moment,
as I have treated her skin with baby oil.
We were told this might prevent Cookie from
continuing to mistake Sugar for a cone of cotton candy.

Poor Sugar is being snatched baldheaded by her diabolical little cage mate, and we never saw it coming . In fact, we thought that Sugar might have developed a case of mites, and went so far as to treat her for them, until the day last week when I walked into the kitchen and caught Cookie in the act. Sugie was taking a drink from the water bottle and it LOOKED as though Cookie was standing behind her waiting her turn .... until she heard me enter the room and turned her head, allowing me to see a long strand of white hair hanging out of her mouth. "COOKIE PIG!" I said, horrified, as Beelzebub gobbled away the evidence like a strand of spaghetti.

We have tried everything short of putting them in different cages (no spare cage, no room). We bought a second house, on the theory that they were having territorial battles over the largish one Sugar had shared with Moe, a second water bottle and another food dish. This reduced them from a reasonable amount of space to the cavy equivalent of town homes, but they seemed to take their reduced quarters in stride, and we thought we'd hit on a solution until we noticed more hair missing from Sugar's back. We tried subdividing the cage with a cooling rack, just like we do when bringing new pigs home from the pet store, but the two of them went ballistic, wheeking and scrabbling at the divider until Cookie managed to scale the thing and hurtle herself over it into Sugar's space. We took the divider down after the third time she went over the top. She's a bully, but we don't want her to hurt herself.

There isn't a lot of information out there about how to deal with an aggressive guinea pig (Just typing that feels ridiculous. An aggressive GUINEA PIG?!? Isn't that an oxymoron?). Our neighbors loaned us some bitter apple spray, and the pet store recommended using baby oil, the smell of which apparently repels guinea pigs, and which would at the very least soothe Sugar's skin. We have no idea if it's working, and now the kitchen smells like a sour nursery.

Our next step will be to buy a bigger cage (which on the one hand will cost major bucks, but will also make a SMASHING centerpiece for my kitchen). In the meantime we're keeping an eagle eye on the two of them, and swooping in if we see Cookie even look sideways at Sugar. "Do you want to be donated to a preschool?" we ask her.

That's a threat that would scare ME straight.