Group Guide
Small Pets
Sold as starter pets, priced as impulse buys, and almost universally under-housed.
Nothing on this page is a beginner animal in the way pet shops imply. Small pets are cheap to buy and expensive to keep properly, they nearly all need company of their own kind, and the enclosures sold for them are usually a fraction of what they need. That's not a reason to avoid them — it's the thing to know before you start.
At a glance — all small pets
- Lifespan
- 3–12 years
- Adult weight
- 100 g – 4 kg
- Daily attention
- 1–3 hrs
- Alone time tolerated
- Most need a companion
- Minimum housing
- Bigger than what's sold
- Diet
- Species-specific, unforgiving
- Handling
- Varies widely
- With children
- Supervised, always
- With other pets
- Prey animals — keep separate
The single most useful thing on this page: the minimum enclosure sizes here are larger than what most retailers sell as adequate.
Species · 2 listed
Every entry below is a species page with its own breeds, costs and honest warnings.
Rabbit
Not a starter pet. A decade-long, social, indoor animal that happens to be small.
- Keep in pairs
- Needs space
- Exotics vet
Guinea Pig
Genuinely gentle, genuinely social, and never to be kept alone.
- Never keep alone
- Vitamin C daily
- Vocal
The pet-shop version versus the real one
- Almost every species here is social. One alone in a hutch is the default setup and it is the wrong one.
- Vet care for these animals is specialist and not cheap. Find the exotics vet before you need one at 9pm.
- "Good first pet for a child" is a sales line, not an animal welfare assessment. The adult is the keeper.
Availability, registration and keeping requirements differ from place to place. Check the rules where you live before you commit to any animal — we describe animals, not law.