Types Of Guinea Pigs

PETA donates $1million to help find animal testing alternatives

Further grants

Through the McGrath Family Foundation of San Diego, which supports PETA's efforts to replace animals in laboratories with modern alternatives, PETA has given a $62,000 grant to the International QSAR Foundation to support the acceptance of an alternative to carcinogenicity testing for drug development, cosmetics ingredients, and chemical testing.

In addition, PETA UK, one of PETA's overseas affiliates-is giving a $130,000 grant to CRO CeeTox for the validation of a non-animal skin allergy test that is commonly used to test cosmetics.

PETA claims that in the current animal tests, 32 to 80 guinea pigs or 16 to 60 mice have chemical substances repeatedly smeared onto their skins or injected into their bodies.

Among PETA's previous grants was support for the validation of a non-animal skin irritation method that was subsequently accepted by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development and that has replaced the use of rabbits for chemical testing worldwide.

Synthetic skin option

Earlier this year, researchers from Ohio State University explored one of the options to finally drive animal testing out of the cosmetics industry, by replacing animal skin with synthetic skin.

The research suggested that currently available types of synthetic skin may now be good enough to imitate animal skin in laboratory tests, and may be on their way to truly simulating human skin in the future.

Researchers compared the response of synthetic skins to rat skin when they were both exposed to a generic skin cream treatment, and the results indicated they both reacted similarly.

Different Types Of Guinea Pigs Breed Colors And Variations

From hair length and texture to color and size, guinea pigs come in all sorts of mixtures. If you were to count the different types of guinea pigs that there are today, you could easily reach twenty-five, though no one knows the exact number for sure. Guinea pig breeders are always working to create new and different types of guinea pigs by selecting out one male with specific traits to mate with a female who has specific traits. For example, recently guinea pig breeders have been working to introduce a new breed that has no hair at all.

Read this chapter so that you can absorb some of the information about different types of guinea pigs. You do not need to memorize the information which can be confusing because further on in this article you will have the chance to decide on the type of guinea pig that is perfect for you.

Genetics and Breeds

You may recall from school biology the story of Gregor Mendal who discovered plant genetics by crossbreeding different types of peas. Just as Mendal isolated the dominant and recessive genes in plants and then cross-pollinated these plants to create big, little, sweet, purple and short types of peas, so too do breeders combine dominant and recessive genes in guinea pigs. For example, since the gene for long hair is recessive in guinea pigs, a shorthaired mother and a longhaired father would produce a shorthaired baby cavy. Only when both parents have long hair would a cavy be born with long hair as well. The same sort of logic applies to the genes that determine the guinea pig's behavior, color and size.

You can see from the lists below that a vast array of guinea pigs exists for you to choose as your pet and companion.

Name of

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