There’s a lot more guinea pig-related media than we thought, and of course Peppa Pig would have an episode or two that features them, right? We enjoy doing these reviews just as much as you enjoy reading them, and we want to make it easy for you to decide whether or not this is something you want to spend your time watching!
Because it’s a kids’ show, it makes sense that the Peppa Pig episodes are short, and guinea pigs are only part of the episode in order to keep up with the attention span of kids!
In this review, we’ll be reviewing two videos! One is a short, fun video about Peppa and her family taking care of her teacher’s pet guinea pigs, and the second is a short segment of a regular episode. Both aired in the later half of 2021. We’re always trying to find fun content that has to do with guinea pigs in mainstream media, so it’s always exciting when we come across some!
What is Peppa Pig?
Peppa Pig is a British animated TV show by Astley Baker Davies that has gained popularity amongst children all over the world and has been broadcast in over 180 countries. The show first aired back in 2004, so it’s been around for almost twenty years. Because the show has been going on for so long, Peppa Pig has been voiced by several different actors, with the first being Lily Snowden-Fine. It’s said that the show has been renewed for up until 2027, so there is more Peppa to come!
The show takes place in a world where pretty much all the characters are animals, and the plot of the show revolves around Peppa’s friends and family. What’s interesting is that the main characters are animals, but there are still pet animals—this makes us wonder how they decided which animals got to be “people” and which ones got to be pets.
The characters still display some behaviors and make the same noises that they would if they were regular animals, but wear clothes, drive cars, and eat human foods like pizza. Another thing that is interesting is that the Rabbit and Mole families live in burrows that are located in a hill, but those burrows have windows and are furnished like other houses.
What is Peppa Pig and Guinea Pigs about?
In the short episode, Peppa Pig is at school and her class gets introduced to her teacher’s pair of pet guinea pigs. The first thing that instantly concerned us was the size of their cage. We know, we know, it’s just a cartoon meant for kids, but don’t underestimate the power of media representations!
Her teacher, Ms. Gazelle, then says that she’s going on vacation, or “holiday” and needs someone to take care of her guinea pigs while she’s away. Peppa immediately volunteers herself for the job, touting that she “loves animals.” Again, this is so interesting since she herself is an animal, and so is everyone else in the classroom.
When the school day ends, Peppa goes running out to her parents to show off the guinea pigs and what she had agreed to do. Her parents don’t seem very happy about it, and it becomes even more clear when Ms. Gazelle shows them the huge pile of supplies that they’ll need to bring home with them.
She also gives them a schedule in the form of a chart that lists when the guinea pigs need to be fed and when they need to be brushed—these guinea pigs apparently have to be brushed in the middle of the night! She also makes sure to tell them that the guinea pigs can get lonely so they need someone to sleep in the same room as them. Peppa’s parents seem even more concerned, because they know that they’re going to be the ones that have to take care of the guinea pigs.
When they arrive at home, Ms. Gazelle calls Peppa’s parents to let them know that the guinea pigs also need to have hay to eat. Daddy Pig takes Peppa and her brother to the pet store to buy hay, and the pet store is run by Mrs. Rabbit. Again, we have to comment on how interesting it is that certain animals are able to have human-like lives, and others are not.
When choosing hay, they’re given three options for regular hay, premium hay, and extra premium hay—they’re then told that Ms. Gazelle usually buys the extra premium hay, so Daddy Pig has to buy the same one. When they get home, Peppa Pig and her brother play with the guinea pigs for the rest of the day.
At night, Mummy Pig sleeps in the living room with the guinea pigs so they don’t get lonely, and agrees to brush their hair in the middle of the night. The family then receives a phone call from Ms. Gazelle in the middle of the night reminding them that the guinea pigs need to be brushed.
The show then does a time skip and to Ms. Gazelle shows up at the Pig family’s house to pick up her guinea pigs! What we found interesting is that the guinea pigs were playing outside with Peppa Pig and her brother in what looks closer to a properly sized cage/playpen that we would have for piggies in real life!
What the show definitely gets right is the amount of poop that guinea pigs produce, because by the time that Ms. Gazelle is done asking the Pig family if they enjoyed taking care of the guinea pigs, there is quite a large amount of poop scattered around the cage.
When Ms. Gazelle asks the family if they’d like to take care of the guinea pigs from now on whenever she goes on vacation, Peppa Pig is quick to agree, but her parents don’t seem so sure.
What is Peppa Pig at the Petting Farm about?
In this episode of Peppa Pig, the guinea pig segment is actually quite short, but we think it accurately portrays what it’s actually like for families with children to have guinea pigs, so we wanted to include it! After watching this part of the episode, it seems to us that the previous episode that we had talked about either hadn’t happened yet in the Peppa Pig Universe, so they hadn’t taken care of their teacher’s guinea pigs just yet.
The Pig family is at the petting farm on a family trip and they go to see the guinea pigs. The worker there is talking to Peppa and her family about guinea pigs and telling them what great pets they make, and Peppa immediately asks her parents if they could get one.
Her parents are immediately hesitant, and say that they don’t have the space for a guinea pig. The worker then says that you don’t need a lot of space for a guinea pig, which as experienced guinea pig owners would know, isn’t exactly true.
Her parents then give another excuse as to why the family can’t have guinea pigs, stating that they need a lot of time devoted to looking after them, which can be true, but the worker says that they’re very easy to care for.
Another thing that Peppa’s parents say is that Peppa won’t want to look after them forever, and the worker says that the parents can just take care of the guinea pigs then, which was what was going to happen anyways. This is the common reality when it comes to kids and their pet guinea pigs—oftentimes, the parents end up looking after the piggies.
At this point, Daddy Pig distracts Peppa and the worker and tells them that it’s time to go in order to avoid adopting a guinea pig. The rest of the episode has nothing to do with guinea pigs, and it instead veers off into a different direction with a few different topics and plotlines, just like many kids’ shows do in order to keep up with their attention span.
What we wish they would have done better
Just like when we first described the opening of the episode, the guinea pigs were being kept in a very small cage, one that we’d say would be better suited for something much smaller, such as a hamster. And like we mentioned earlier, we know that this is just an animated kids’ show, it’s important to remember that representation matters, especially in a kids’ show.
Kids these days spend so much time watching things, whether it’s on TV or on YouTube, and they do a lot of their learning this way. It’s important that the kids are getting correct, accurate information about how to take care of guinea pigs if this show is going to influence them into wanting to have guinea pigs as pets.
This is something that can be pretty shallow, but we also wish that they could have drawn the guinea pigs in a cuter way. The internet definitely had something to say about this as well! Users on TikTok have commented on the way the guinea pigs look in the show, and others on Twitter have said something similar. What we will say is that when they’re animating the guinea pigs and showing them pooping, they add a funny little “toot” sound effect.
We also wish there was an explanation for how they choose which animals get to have a normal “human” life and who has to live life as a pet.
Final Thoughts
If you’re like us and just want to be able to watch content that includes guinea pigs in some way, then this is something that we recommend checking out, especially if you have a spare ten minutes—because that’s all the time it will take for you to watch the short episode about Peppa taking care of Ms. Gazelle’s guinea pig, as well as the short petting farm segment about the guinea pigs in the other episode!
Want to read our other reviews of media content that features guinea pigs?
Check out these blog posts!
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