Our Minnie has been driving me mad lately.

Since Fizz arrived on the scene, she has gone from a contented quiet little guinea pig into a rampant over sexed little scrubber.

I tried letting them loose together, but that just resulted in Minnie offering herself to Fizz with loud whirring noises, and when that didn’t work she did her best to shag Fizz’s brains out.  I had to separate them again.

They each have a cage now, and the cages are close enough for them to happily converse, but not close enough for Minnie to get steamed up.  That, you would imagine, is the ideal set-up.

But no.  Minnie decided that she wanted to get closer and the only way to do that was to exit her cage.  To her chagrin however, she discovered that there were metal bars in the way.  She decided to eat her way through them.

I like guinea pigs.  As pets or for dinner, it’s all the same to me.  However, I have discovered that their intelligence quotient is somewhere down around the level of Mary Coughlan or Sarah Palin.  Minnie will just not learn that eating metal bars is a futile exercise.

For the last couple of weeks, Minnie has been twanging the bars on her cage and it is really irritating.  It is incessant and loud.  I tried thwapping her on the nose with some paper every time she did it, but she just looked surprised for a moment before deciding to resume.  I thereby learned another lesson – guinea pigs are not easy to train.

I did contemplate electrifying the bars on the cage, and initial experiments were quite successful.  However, I think Minnie quite enjoyed the pretty sparks and the smell of burning fur and she soon resumed her twanging.

I finally found the solution today.

Since this morning, life here has been blissfully quiet.  Minnie is happy, and so am I.

What did I do?

I smeared the bars of her cage with Marmite.

Guinea pigs apparently don’t like Marmite.