Thousands of years ago, the native peoples of South America ate wild cavies. The Incas eventually domesticated the animal around 5000 B.C.E. They used cavies for food and in religious ceremonies. The Spaniards who arrived in Peru in the sixteenth century had never before seen these animals.
After the Spanish conquest of the Inca Empire in the mid-1500s, Dutch merchants brought cavies back to Europe. They became popular as pets among aristocrats in Europe during the 1600s, in large part because Queen Elizabeth I of England kept one as a pet.
Over the next three hundred years, Europeans began deliberately breeding guinea pigs for different traits. In the nineteenth century, British immigrants brought some of these specially bred guinea pigs to America, and the cavy fancy in the United States was set to flourish.
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