Mites help needed!

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Lynx
Celebrate!!!

Post   » Tue Apr 09, 2002 3:01 pm


You´ll get alot of opinions on this. I kind of think many pigs have Selnic mites (the classic cavy mite), which can reportedly exist on a pig subclinically and only get out of hand if the pig is ill or under stress (like a pregnancy).

However, some people seem to have great difficulty getting rid of them. It´s been suggested that they are picked up at pet stores or by handling other cavies. While the med books claim mites are species specific and only reproduce and thrive on a single species, I sometimes wonder if this is true. Take one variety of mite -- fur mites. I have absolutely no idea how my pigs could have caught them and can only guess that they might have been from greens I picked and be instead some other species of fur mites that I somehow picked up (in other words, this mite would not be called species specific).

Mange mites do need an animal to survive and live on, so hay seems to be out (it dries and you´d think mites would not be there) and of course bedding seems pretty unlikely. I do think there are many skin parasites that have the potential to bug our pets, some of which could be carried by mice or rats.

I think the main thing to come away with is to try to do something about them if they are suspected. Surely some people have never had pigs with hairloss.

User avatar
Becky

Post   » Tue Apr 09, 2002 9:54 pm


Knock on wood, but my two girls haven´t had any hairloss. They do get what I heard called "hay lice" which occassionally live on the shafts of their hair, but a bath with EctoSooth takes care of them easily. They don´t seem to be bothered by them either. Both my piggies graze on grass all the time.

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