Runaway rodent back in the pen after 5 months eluding capture

After hundreds of tries, Paul Matheson finally caught a little brown guinea pig that wiggled out of the grip of a visitor at the Brudenell Miniatures Barnyard Zoo in Montague, P.E.I., five months ago.

In the fall, he might see it three or four times a day, hanging with the horses or cavorting with the cats. 

"It'd be hiding underneath different sheds and buildings and out in the field and you'd go and try to catch it and it'd just be gone," Matheson said.

The guinea pig managed to find shelter during post-tropical storm Fiona. When the cold weather came, she would disappear for a few days at a time. 

"You'd figure something got ahold her or she may have passed away."

But Matheson always kept his net nearby, just in case. He estimates he tried hundreds of times to catch her.

"I didn't kind of write her off," he said. "If I had friends over, if we'd seen her we'd try and get her wrangled up but could never actually catch her."

Then, on Thursday, the guinea pig finally slipped up. The party was over.

"She was running around playing with the cats and she ran down into the tunnel that the rabbits had made and went into the rabbit pen and I went and grabbed my net and, sure enough, she ended up going into the little shelter that the rabbits had."

The guinea pig, who was only four weeks old when she escaped, is now safe and warm inside the barn with the rest of the animals. 

Matheson is now having a contest on Facebook to name the runaway rodent.

"It's nice to have her in, and don't have to keep leaving feed for her outside every day," Matheson said. "I was pretty surprised that she actually survived."