The guinea pig is a small rodent native to the Andes mountains of South America. Among the locals there, it is a popular dish.
Guinea pigs got their names from the loud, high-pitched squealing they make when they are hungry, or when they are scared, or when they want to be held, or for no damn reason at all. It sounds like this: 'Week week week Weeeeek week WEEEEEEEEEEK!!! WEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEK!!!! Week week week weeeeek' and it just goes on like that until you give it a carrot or some other leftover vegetable to shut it up. This is why guinea pigs are usually fat. They also make a satisfying purr sound when you pet them.
Guinea pigs come in a few varieties, but the most common are smooth-coated and abyssinian. Smooth coated guinea pigs look like overinflated rats, and have a shiny coat of short hair. Abyssinian guinea pigs are the closest terrestrian relative to the tribble. They are covered with thick long hair that is intensely whorled. I had a solid black one once named Pudge, and it was difficult to tell which end was the front.
Although the squeaking can get annoying, guinea pigs actually make pretty cool pets. They are social creatures, and will learn to enjoy being petted and held, unlike gerbils or hamsters, who seem to only learn how to restrain their terror. The fact that they are pretty cute helps as well. Care for a guinea pig means keeping it in a cage with newspaper or wood chip bedding that should be regularly changed. Food is store-bought GP chow, augmented with leftover greens from the salad you should be eating every night or two.
My sister and I had a male and female guinea pig when we were younger. When the female is in heat, it is a terrible thing to behold. When we kept them in separate cages, Pudge got as close to Amy as he could, and squeaked as loud as we'd ever heard until we gave in and put him in the same cage as her. Then it was Amy's turn to start squeaking at top volume as Pudge had his way with her. His purring was a nice touch as well. Pudge was a black abyssinian, and Amy was a smooth-coated agouti (the natural color of wild cavies; it's a kind of silvery hair). The babies were all sorts of calico colors, but all were abyssinian. They were very cute balls of fluff, and unlike hamsters, Amy never ate one (that we saw).
Guinea pigs live about 4 years, with good care and love.
A series of Japanese horror films started in 1985. They were made as a showpiece for special effects artists and to push the boundaries of the genre and the endurance of the viewers. Considered classics by fans of extreme horror, they have gained notoriety for their gore and depravity. Specifically, the first two of the series have garnered the most public attention by starting congressional hearings on the subject of snuff films. The first two had little plot, almost no dialog, and no background music. They centered around the abduction of a woman, followed by her torture and dismemberment.
After the first two, the mood of the series changed, and they became more stand-alone movies of a very different mood. Episode 3 and 4 are movies in their own right, and while they do contain the gore of the first two they aren't nearly as brutal. Episode 5 is very strange; it's something of a gore comedy tv show, hosted by a popular Japanese transvestite named Peter. Episode 6 and 8 borrow footage from the previous films, and were probably released just for profit. The seventh episode was released to "prove" that Flower of Flesh and Blood was not a real snuff film.
Complete list of films: 1. Devil's Expirement - 1985 2. Flower of Flesh and Blood - 1986 (aka: Flower of Bloody Flesh) 3. He Never Dies - 1992 4. Android of Notre Dame - 1988 5. Mermaid in a Manhole - 1988 6. Devil Woman Doctor - 1990 7. Slaughter Special - 1991 8. The Making of Guinea Pig - 1992
Films commonly listed as Guinea Pig: These films are commonly sold as Guinea Pig series but are not: 1. Evil Dead Trap 1 + 2 2. Cyclops 3. Guzoo 4. Bloody Fragments on White Walls (aka: Lucky Sky Diamond) 5. The Man Behind the Sun series.
This is the most complete (and generally accepted) list for the series. There are numerous problems with compounding such a list. First, the first two videos were released by Midnight Video then changed ownership to Japan Home Video. When JHV took it over, many of the films were labeled as "Guinea Pig 2" and soon resellers were doing the same. Also, in the Encyclopaedia of Japanese Film by Thomas Weisser, the films are listed incorrectly and the list was commonly used to identify the films. On top of all of this, the chronological order of the last few films is not known. The order from these last films is taken from packaging from a few Japanese distributors.
The videos are not hard to come by if you look enough. eBay is probably the easiest place to find them, but be warned. The quality will be horrible, possibly no subtitles, and maybe an edited version of the film. Also, because all the films are relatively short, many tapes are sold with two episodes per tape. Personally, I suggest Midnight Video (www.midnight1.com) or Japan Shock Video (www.japan-shock.com).
I do not suggest watching these films unless you have a strong stomach. They are disturbing and VERY violent.
Update: All 8 films have been released on DVD as a boxed set. Many horror retailers are carrying it, and it runs from 160-200 dollars. It includes all eight films on seperate DVDs, as well as a poster and t-shirt. (It's also available in PAL format.) Also, it seems the NTSC DVDs are starting to come out. Check out guineapigfilms.com for screenshots and production stills from the films.
In informal English usage, "guinea pig" means the subject of an experiment. In current laboratory research on animals, mice and rats are more commonly used rodents than guinea pigs; however, in the past the guinea pig, or cavy, was widely used in scientific research. The biggest boom in their use came in the 1880s after two discoveries in bacteriology: in 1882 German bacteriologist Robert Koch used guinea pigs to discover the bacterium that causes tuberculosis because mice and rats did not develop obvious symptoms, and in 1884 German bacteriologist Friedrich Löffler (or Loeffler) discovered that mice and rats were not very susceptible to diphtheria, but guinea pigs are extremely sensitive to it. In fact, guinea pigs have an immune system much more like that of humans than most rodents, and so were the most widely used test animal in the tracking down of disease germs in the late 1800s and early 1900s.
Guinea pigs are also one of the few lab animals which require vitamin C in their diets rather than being able to synthesize it in their bodies; this led to the discovery of vitamin C in 1907. They are still used to study body processes which require vitamin C. They also need to take in folic acid, thiamine, arginine and potassium, making them useful in other nutrition studies. NetVet Veterinary resources cites some additional features which make guinea pigs useful in research:
Mice were used in the initial toxicity tests because of their small size, which economised the precious material, but what a lucky chance it was, for in this respect man is like the mouse and not the guinea pig. If we had used guinea pigs exclusively, we should have said that penicillin was toxic...This perhaps carries with it the suggestion that the dramatisers of science who wrote for the public press might with some appropriateness refer to "human mice" rather than to "human guinea pigs" in the future.
Sources: Allen, Arthur. Vaccine: the Controversial Story of Medicine's Greatest Lifesaver. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2007. http://www.rds-online.org.uk/pages/page.asp?i_PageID=1264&i_ToolbarID=5 http://www.medterms.com/script/main/art.asp?articlekey=34369 http://www.britannica.com/eb/article-9048742/Friedrich-August-Johannes-Loffler http://www.answers.com/topic/guinea-pig?cat=health http://netvet.wustl.edu/species/guinea/gpmodel.txt http://research.uiowa.edu/animal/?get=g_pig http://www.straightdope.com/columns/011012.html http://www.worldwidewords.org/qa/qa-gui1.htm http://www.fbresearch.org/education/MythPenicillin.htm http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2005/aug/25/thisweekssciencequestions1 McMurray, David N. "Guinea Pig Model of Tuberculosis," Tuberculosis: Pathogenesis, Protection, and Control ed. Barry R. Bloom. ASM Press, 1994. accessed through books.google.com
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