Look at those adorable photos of my two guinea pig co-pets, Sambal (grey and white) and Hello Pineapple (tri-colored). Don’t they have the sweetest faces? Well, they are not the sweetest animals, let me tell you that! My owner made that combined photo with the two piglins facing away from each other for a reason: they are the most bitter of bitter enemies!

It’s true. When Coral and Carl entrusted us with these two adorable pigs, they told us never to put them together or they would kill each other. Specifically, Hello Pineapple (aka HP) would kill Sambal. This is odd because HP is only about half Sambal’s size but she is a tough little thing.

We have been following The Two Cs directive on this up until this week. This week my owner set up a big outdoor enclosure for them with plenty of hiding spots and obstacles and lots of places to run. There’s also a lot of juicy grass in there which piglins love.

Then my owner put the two guinea pigs in and said get over it, you pigs are not coming out until you learn to get along.

As you can see in the above photo, I tried to watch but there was some tasty grass outside the pen too and I was hungry after a long swim.

At first it looked like they might just get along, although they were behaving rather suspiciously. But soon violence broke out.

HP was the looser in this encounter, coming away with a bloody chest and a bit of a limp, although the bleeding quickly stopped and the limp disappeared.

We thought maybe that was all they needed to establish dominance. The continued to face off but for a long time there were no more physical disputes.

We were pretty hopeful. It seemed they would just posture and then lie down, as if lying down was making some kind of profound statement. I don’t get that because capybaras stand on their hind legs as a threat posture and guinea pigs lie down. It’s like they’re not even really rodents.

Anyway, peace had not yet broken out.

Now Sambal won one fight and HP won one fight and they seemed to have reached a stale mate. They are still posturing but after spending a couple more hours together there were no more physical confrontations.

After that they got to retire to their separate cages.

We are going to keep trying this for a few days and when they actually seem to be friends, we’ll let them mingle when they are inside. Crazy guinea pigs, wouldn’t they like to snuggle together? That would be so cute.