cutting Guinea Pig nails

One of the many joys of owning 9 Guinea Pigs is that you have to cut their nails. With 3 nails on each rear foot, and 4 on each front foot, that gives me 126 chances to cut a nail too short.

Cutting a nail too close to the "quick" (the pinkish reddish part that you can't even see if the nail is black instead of white) causes them to yelp and then bleed profusely.

I managed to do that last night to Ginger (pictured below). Sorry Ginger!

Luckily, there is something called styptic powder (which seems to be made of clean dirt and various metal shavings?) that we keep handy for such situations, which stops the bleeding pretty quickly.