 Hey there, welcome back to the tiny herd where we talk about everyday pet care for guinea pigs, rabbits, and other small pets. So today I'm going to be doing a video showing you how I went about doing a bonding session between Georgie and my newest guinea pig Jelly Bean. And I'm also going to be sharing a little bit in this video about Jelly Bean and his story and how I got him. So to start off with you can see here I have a bonding area set up. When you go about bonding a guinea pig with a new friend you want to set up the space to be as neutral as possible. So that means you want it to be in an area that is neutral to both piggies, so not one of their cages. You don't want there to be a bunch of hideys for one to get cornered in. Pretty much all I do is set up a playpen with a big pile of hay in the middle, and I do it in my living room or somewhere that the guinea pigs really don't go. That way there's no smells to distract them and they really can just focus on getting to know each other and sorting out any dominance issues. So that is the basics of doing bonding. The main thing when you're bonding guinea pigs is to watch their behavior. I'm not going to go super into detail on behaviors. You'll probably hear a lot of chattering. There'll be some chasing, lunging, that sort of thing. Really you just want to make sure that they aren't hurting each other and you don't want one pig to be overwhelmingly bullied by the other one. So I had these two boys out on the floor here for about I would say five to six hours on a Saturday. They ended up laying down next to each other eating hay and they seemed to be pretty well getting along. There was no biting each other. They never hurt each other. That is one big thing. If one guinea pig breaks skin on another guinea pig and there's you know any actual biting or blood or anything like that, those pigs really can't go together. I would stop the bonding process there and just separate them and let them be separate because that's really getting into dangerous territory. But Georgie and Jelly Bean seemed to be getting along pretty well. So at that point after five or six hours, I did thoroughly clean their cage. I actually basically set up a new CNC cage because I rearranged the room to make room for them to be together and I put down all new fleece, new houses, fresh hay bags, all that good stuff. And they actually at the point that you guys are seeing this video have been together successfully for several weeks now. So that was a successful bonding session between the two of them. And I am really excited for Georgie to actually have a friend at this point. So I did want to tell you guys a little bit about Jelly Bean and kind of introduce him. So you can see he is the white black and brown piggy in this video. He is, I don't really know how old he is. I believe they said he was about three years old, but I can't quite remember. So I actually woke up one morning and one of my friends had text me a screenshot of a Facebook group of a family trying to re-home their guinea pig because they had had a pair of guinea pigs and one of them had sadly passed away. And the one that was left, which was Jelly Bean, he seemed very sad and they knew that guinea pigs needed to be with a friend. So they wanted to find a new friend for Jelly Bean. So I reached out to them and I kind of talked to them, told them that I have, you know, five other guinea pigs. And I have had them for years now. I know how to bond them. I had a lone male that I had been looking for a friend and it just worked out really well that the lady and her son thought it would be a great home for them and the son was really happy to have a place for Jelly Bean to go where he had a friend. So that makes me extra happy that him and Georgie worked out and that they are happy together at this point. But it was funny because I woke up to that text and then reached out to them and we actually picked up Jelly Bean just a couple hours later that same day because they were in our town. So that worked out really really well and I let Jelly Bean have his own space, get settled in for about a week and I wanted to make sure I had plenty of time on the day that I tried to bond them instead of trying to kind of rush them. So I spent a whole Saturday bonding them and getting them sorted out. So I wanted to show you guys a little bit of the footage of doing some bonding with them, talk about that and then I will show you guys Jelly Bean a little closer up and show you guys their new cage setup.