Are guinea pigs ever REALLY used as…guinea pigs? You hear about lab rats and mice, but I can’t recall ever seeing pictures of guinea pigs running mazes, being made to smoke cigarettes through a rubber tube, and so on, while guys in white coats take notes. All I know is nobody’s coming near MY guinea pig with any experimental substances.
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Plus. While guinea pigs are sometimes used as guinea pigs–that is, as experimental subjects–this is comparatively rare. Ken Boschert, a veterinarian with Washington University’s division of comparative medicine and the operator of a Web site called Net Vet (netvet.wustl.edu), estimates that 99 percent of experimental animals nowadays are rats and mice, which are small, cheap to feed, and reproduce quickly. More important, rats and mice are easier to manipulate genetically and can be made to model a greater range of human conditions than guinea pigs.
Minus. When guinea pigs do wind up in the lab, it ain’t pretty. A page on Dr. Boschert’s site reports that one use of guinea pigs is in the study of anaphylaxis (hypersensitivity to a substance following initial contact): “Sensitized guinea pig develops acute shock, respiratory collapse and death within 2-5 minutes upon later re-exposure to the antigen.”
We’re not even sure why guinea pigs are called guinea pigs. They don’t come from Guinea, which of course is in Africa; the guinea pig (Cavia porcellus, also known as the cavy) originated in South America. Some think Guinea was confused with the Guiana region, which is in South America, but this notion is generally discounted. One plausible theory is that guinea pigs were shipped back to Europe in Guineamen–that is, slave-trading vessels, which, having off-loaded their human cargo in the New World, needed paying freight for the long ride home.
