All Things Guinea Pig: We have babies! Meet 'Possum'

This little honey of a pig is 'Possum'. She was a big, gorgeous single bub born to Meadow, fathered by Talbot on the 22nd April. She has daddy's colouring, and a somewhat sheba-style coat. I had hoped with this pairing that mum and dad's recessive curl genes might match up and give me a curly sheba-style bub... but with only a 1 in 4 chance of that happening, it's not surprising that we got the straight coat we did. She should be homozygous for rosetting, hopefully (just means that she should hopefully have both genes for the rosettes), but we won't know unless we try breeding her to a non-rosetted animal. But I doubt I would waste a litter just trying to establish that because even if all babies came out rosetted, it still wouldn't be conclusive.

At this stage we just need to focus more on getting those rosettes in the best placements. You can see that she lacks the shoulder/jaw rosettes that would give her the classic sheba chops (cheek fur that sweeps out and back around towards the front of the face), and doesn't have a great deal over her body. But she DOES have an incredibly dense coat, and a slight chance that she's inherited a recessive curl gene - so we will mostly likely keep her here to test that. (ie. she will be paired with one of my curly-sheba coated boars when she's old enough, and if we get curly babies from the pairing then we'll know she does indeed carry the curl. Hopefully I'll have a boar with a better rosette placement to put her with by then too ).

But this is all many months down the track. For now we just get to enjoy one gorgeous fat, chunky little monkey of a pig!