Rest in Peace Indiana, Feb 2017 - Nov 2018

It is with great sadness that we must official announce the passing of our little angel Indiana 🐹💔😔. Those of you who have been following us over the last week will know that she has been very ill and despite our best efforts her body gave up on her yesterday afternoon. It has not been a good year for us for loosing piggies; the original 8 are now down to 5 and it certainly does not get any easy, particularly with young piggies 💔.

Indiana came to us from Blackberry Patch rescue, an excited Tracey messaged me to say she had the perfect HayPig piggy and I had to meet her. She'd lived her first 9 months as a solitary pig, so was socially awkward / a bit of b***h with other guinea pigs! Tracey had had problems with her attacking all the others, but then I saw her and my heart melted - she was the most beautiful little creature ever! 😍😍😍 I told Helen Tracey was coming round for a visit and she knew straight away I'd agreed to take another pig on!
We had introduced her to our herd and had some troubles at first. She was feisty and aggressive, and we noticed a few teeth wounds and chucks of hair missing on the other pigs. But we worked hard to settle her in and the aggression soon stopped. Over the coming months, we then saw a complete transformation from her. She began grooming all the other pigs, snuggling up with them and following them about. Maybe Indiana just needed time to work out what a family was.

It's hard to believe Indiana was only in our lives just over a year, we've had so many amazing experiences with her and she was such a huge personality. Known as the sassy pig, like many Abyssinians, Indiana had no trouble coming forward! She was vocal and fearless and half your job was keeping her in one place such was her love to explore. For this reason, she would let us take great photos and videos of her and allowed us to get really close and intimate with her. She has provided some laugh-out-loud moments with her antics, like her up-side-down drinking, her piggy kisses, her photo bombs and her attempted run escapes mid-filming. We will miss all that and we know our herd will miss her too, she became so friendly with them all.
We first noticed the warning signs of a problem in her around the time Xena passed. There had been some weight loss and some of her hair was falling out. This is often the indication of a ovarian cyst (a fairly common problem in lady pigs) and having just been through the procedure with Pepper, we thought we'd be going through it again with Indiana. But after a couple of thorough examinations at our exotic vets and some tests, a more ominous problem came to light. It appeared Indiana's kidneys were not functioning properly and were unlikely to get much better. There were drugs that we could try to manage the problem for her, but it would be a case of trying to maintain a quality of life for her rather than being able to fix the problem. We set out with a positive mindset, to get some more weight on her and try the drugs, and over the following few weeks she was given plenty of opportunity to gorge on all sorts of weight building treats. We gave her food in isolation with Napoleon, which actually benefited them both and gave them more time to eat (away from the rest of the greedy guts!). We also administered critical care to give her a boast. But despite some really positive munching and extra meal times, the weight continued to drop off.

If you've followed our journey over the last week you'll know what happened next. It's all very raw right now and I'd rather focus on all the great times we had together with Indiana than go through it all again. But I guess in summary, the hardest thing about the whole situation is the feeling of helplessness. You try everything. You get a small win, or have a positive day and your heart gets a little charge and then she has a bad day or the next weigh-in shows another loss. Indiana was certainly a fighter and if we didn't believe we could pull her through we wouldn't have been up three times a night syringe feeding her. But fate decided we wouldn't have long with the little sassy pig and we are just so grateful for the time we had with her. As with all the other HayPigs, she will not be forgotten and is already immortalised in our 2019 calendar. We hope she is enjoying meeting up with Xena, Nutty and Crunchie over that rainbow bridge.

Indiana, you were one of a kind, we are devastated you are gone. Sorry we couldn't fix it. Thank you for everything, you were one amazing little girl and everyone will miss you so much. Rest in peace little one. Mummy and daddy love you. xxx 🐹❤🌈