Hi guys.  Welcome back to Animal Wonders.  I am with Chili Pepper the Patagonian cavy and his little herd of guinea pigs and I wanted to give you an update on what's going on in the romping room.  The romping room is the big area that we built for Chili Pepper to run and play and romp in and it's right behind me, but there was a little hitch to our plan.

We adopted Kizmit, the African crested porcupine, and we were hoping that the two would live together for the rest of their lives.  Unfortunately, it didn't work out between the two of them, but today, I want to show you the solution that we came up with on how to make both their lives happy.

(Intro)

Alright, guys, let me show you what we've been working on.  This is our morning routine.  Hi!  I'm gonna head on into the romping room with Kizmit.  Good girl.  So what I'm doing is preparing the romping room for its daytime cycle.  Kizmit was in here all night and now it's time for her to leave so Chili Pepper can have this space to himself.

In order to do that, we needed to build Kizzie a space that she could spend the day, and you might noticed that there's a door within a door behind me and I want to show you what's on the other side of that door.  Through here is Kizzie's daytime sleeping room and all we have to do is get her to go in there now.  

The first thing we had to do was get Kizmit used to just this new thing here.  She's very cautious around new items, so we had to wait a couple days for her to even go near it, and now the trick is to make it a fun and exciting thing for her to do.  She's getting pretty good at it now, but it still requires us making it heavily laden with treats.

Those first couple days were kind of trial and error and I actually had to show Kizzie that the door was safe by going through it, which is actually pretty spacious.  See?  Easy!  At this point, Kizzie is now pretty comfortable with the doggy door that she can go through, but I do still like to give her treats for coming in here, so I made a couple little behavioral enrichment items for her to play with.

I gave her a new little straw bale and, of course, treats.  Put some treats in these boxes.  Hey, Kizzie, come on through.  Alright, now that she's through, I want to block her off while she's happily enjoying her treats over there.  She is now officially locked out.  After Kizzie's done getting all the treats out of these little boxes, she will curl up and sleep the day away.

Alright now that you've seen Kizzie's daytime space, let's go back and check in with Chili Pepper.  At this point, Chili Pepper has finished his breakfast, so I've brought him some new toys so he can take his turn in the romping room.

Hey, buddy boy.  Look what I've brought you.  Stuff these around so he can play with them as he wants, chew on 'em or whatnot 'cause this is his playtime.  Alright, and now let's open it up.  Then he can come right through there.  Good job, buddy, and now Chili Pepper gets the day to hang out in the romping room.  Kizmit's sleeping.  She is nocturnal, and at night, we'll just flip the situation and Kizmit will get (?~3:32).  That's what I love about this is that they both get to still kind of interact.  They still smell each other and they change the terrain in here so often that it's constant enrichment that they're providing each other.

Alright, I'm going to let him have fun and explore and thank you guys for letting me share this update.  If you'd like to go on an adventure with us every week, subscribe to our YouTube channel, AnimalWondersMontana.  Thanks.

(Endscreen/Credits)