Week 2 Reflection Blog

"Understand and practice the conventions of scholarly discourse."

For the past two week I have been reading a lot different informations off different sources. Guinea pigs are not a common pet or not even a commonly known animal in Taiwan. I have even ran into people asking if my guinea pigs were kittens or rabbits. Therefore, it is hard to get the exact correct informations on raising guinea pigs in Taiwan.

I adopted my guinea pigs from a local shelter called Rodents Care. While they provide reliable informations on guinea pigs, there are not enough information publicized as they are a hamster focused organization. Aside from Rodents Care, I learn about guinea pigs from guinea pigs facebook groups or pages. However, in those cases the informations are not nearly as reliable. I have also seen many contradicting informations like a book which was supposedly written by a vet saying guinea pigs can eat chilis. Hence, I often have to compare between different sources to find matching or mismatching informations and take notes on those with false informations.

Most vets in Taiwan are not specified to guinea pigs and have mostly treated dogs or cats. Therefore, there have been cases were vets from one animal hospital are giving out different guidelines than other hospitals. Due to the lack of guinea pigs they have treated, the mortality rate of guinea pigs undergoing relatively simple surgeries like neutering is oddly high and much more expensive. In comparison, the average price to neuter a male guinea pig is around 50 to 100 dollars while it is usually less than 50 to neuter a dog.

In order to take proper care of my guinea pigs, I have learned to better determine the credibility of scholarly sources.