Keir Royale

And now they’ve come on holiday with us.Sandy and Phoebe are now happily foraging in the corner of the sitting room, since the intended purchase of a run to put in the garden has been foiled by the apparent DIY know-how of rural France.The people here must make their own runs, or perhaps they just keep their cochons d’Inde in cages until they grow big enough to eat. They certainly don’t spend good money on a concoction of wood and chicken wire from a pet shop, when they can easily knock up a shelter themselves for a couple of euros.

We can’t though. We’re a bit townie and useless.So the Guineas are living in a thrown together run of three boxes, now soggy with wee, in the corner of the sitting room. They seem happy, but it wasn’t the Big Idea.

The Big Idea was to liberate their inner South American free-running rodent; to watch them trotting about in the succulent French grass, rendering lawn-mowing unnecessary and showing the children how wild animals really live.Instead, the poor defenceless creatures are prey to enthusiastic kiddy cuddles at any hour of the day, not just after school, and they’re so institutionalised they don’t even bother to make the small step that would take them over the edge of the box and into the sitting room.

And what have the children learned? That they’d rather have a dog that comes when they call its name and doesn’t scuttle back into the safety of its pen, in fear of its life.Les Cochons d’Inde have tasted grass for the first time though, and they love it.No dried hay nonsense for them from now on. Just real, locally sourced, carbon neutral fodder.

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