Critical to have some Critical Care on standby.

As guinea pig owners, those caring for piglets should always have on hand a bag of Oxbow Critical Care for when your guinea pig stops eating on its own and you need to take charge of the situation. We learned this the hard way.

I tried tracking Critical Care down on Oxbow's website, but they do not seem to sell it directly to the consumer (or, in this case, pet owner, ha - imagine guinea pigs doing online shopping, ha!). They recommend you visit your vet to obtain a supply of CC so that your vet can properly examine and diagnose your piggy.

However, I managed to circumvent that whole process by ordering a backup bag online after doing a Google search. Quite possibly, this might just save a piggy's life if you can catch him doing a food strike just in time!

It's basically a complete daily diet of the food your pig normally eats - hay and vitamin C in powder form. You add one part of the Critical Care to two parts warm water, mix it together and suck it into an open syringe. It smells horribly! (The original - anise - flavor does anyway.) There is a second flavor, apple and banana, but by the time I got around to ordering it, it was all sold out.

The avian and exotics place we went to on the Upper West Side prescribed this for Tommy (his bag expires this month, so we sadly cannot use it for any of our other piggies if needed). He did not seem to like it. I wouldn't either. But if piggies cannot eat on their own, this is the only thing that will get them by for the time-being.