My Hamsters (Hamsters)

Member Name: tb240904

Product:	Hamsters
Date:	11/09/09 (17 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: They're cute and cuddly, need little care and don't take up much room .

Disadvantages: They can bite (very hard), smell if not cleaned out and only live about 2 years .

I've had many hamsters in my life - I've loved every one of them. All my hamsters have been Syrians - they make excellent pets which I've been told can't be said for dwarves. For very little care and attention they'll provide you with hours of affection. They're also really funny at times and are, of course, the cutest things you'll ever see.

I've focused on hamsters and given very little information on how to care for them. I will be writing a care guide in the Ciao Cafe later. Also, please ignore the ratings in specific criteria - they are meant for pet food and Ciao requires them to be filled out.

My Hamsters
I thought I'd start by telling you a bit about the hamsters I currently have. At the moment, I have six hamsters. They are:

Sparky ^
Sally
Sugar
Fudge ^
Muffin
Fidget

I've put a ^ next to the boys - the rest are girls. I've also had two other girl hamsters in the last year who have died. They are Tilly and Cinnamon.

Tilly

A sable piebald (I think). She was a christmas present and the reason I have as many hamsters. The pet shop I got her from doesn't have the best reputation and now I know why. I blame them for her death but I'll come to that later, first why she's the reason for the many hamsters. When I got her, she was pregnant. Okay, it's easily done - they mate like rabbits (and are themselves also rodents). The pet shop offered to take the babies off our hands but I wouldn't trust them with a pet rock, let alone a hamster. She gave birth to six hamsters and killed (and ate) three of them. Leaving my little boy Sparky (he's my favourite) and the girls, Muffin and Fidget.Now, the reason I hold the pet shop accountable for her death - they don't take good care of their hamsters in the shop. I've often seen empty food bowls and have even seen a dead hamster in a cage with 3 others. Tilly died in May, around 7-9 months old (she was born around October). Now, I gave her everything she could want - fresh food and water every day, a clean cage once a week and she got out in her ball for 10 minutes at least twice a week. I took care of her as best I could yet she died, supposedly of natural causes, a year and a half younger than her life expectancy. I miss her - she was a good little hamster and brought us 3 adorable babies.

Sparky

Sparky is sable (kind of dark browny-black). He was the runt of Tilly's litter (I think - I can't compare him to the dead hamsters but he's tiny compared to his sisters). He's very friendly and has never bitten me. When he was still a baby, he had black fur so he was referred to as the mole but now looks completely different. I mentioned earlier he's my favourite and it's because although he's a bit timid, he's always been happy to let me hold him whenever he's out of his bed (but really hates being woken up). I've spent the most time with him.

Muffin and Fidget

Up until Tuesday, they were in my sister's room, but she swapped rooms with my mum and doesn't have enough space so I said I'd would take them, provided she cleaned them out and looked after all the hamsters when I'm away (which she's agreed to do before and has just left them without food until I get back). She agreed to this but today was refusing to clean Muffin and Fidget out so I'm throwing out two shelves worth of stuff to make space for the girls - they're starting to smell and I don't want them in my room like that. I would clean them out myself but it's the principle that counts. I will clean them out if my sister doesn't, though - I can't have them living in their own filth!
Anyway, I should be describing them, liek I've done with the others. They are both cream coloured (not golden as most people think when they see them), although Muffin is a lighter shade of cream. They both hate each other and fight whenever they're together, although they don't fight through the bars. They're both very timid but Fisget is more friendly and lets me take her out more often.

Muffin was also pregnant. Before I starting locking the cages with combination locks, they would escape all the time. It just so happened that both Sparky and Muffin escaped on the same night and, well, "copulated". She gave birth to Sugar, Fudge and Cinnamon in June and they're all in their own cages now.

Sally

Sally came before Muffin's babies. I went all the way in to Hamilton to get her after Tilly died (I didn't want an empty cage or my mum would have thrown it out). She has grown attached to me over time but she'll never be as close to me as Sparky - I was there since his birth. She's a banded cream (cream with a white band in the middle). She's very inquisitive and spends most of her time outside the cage climbing the stairs. None of the others seem to be able to do this yet. They can climb down them quite easily and falling down is no trouble at all but climbing up still remains a mystery to them.

Sugar, Fudge and Cinnamon

Like Muffin and Fidget, Fudge and CInnamon were both cream. They were indistinguishable (you had to look to see whether it was a boy or girl to know who you had). Sugar, however, took after her dad - she was the odd one out being white! My sister had kept Cinnamon until she died and I took the other two.

Cinnamon's Death

Cinnamon died last Friday of suffocation. It was painful watching her die - which took 2 hours - but obviously it wasn't nearly as bad as what she was going through. I'm not sure how she managed it, but she broke a bone in her rib cage which had stopped air getting to her lungs (I'm not sure how - hamsters have a wierd physiology - their right lung is in four parts). Now, I'm a strong animal rights activist and I am opposed to euthenasia so it's my fault she had to go through it, but think about it - would you pump your grandmother full of chemicals so she died quickly and (supposedly) painlessly? I doubt it! That's something I hate about vets - they say an animal doesn't feel pain when it's being put down but how do they know. They have no idea what a hamster feels when it's given a lethal injection. Anyway, I seem to have gone off in a tangent. I held Cinnamon for two hours, stroking her gently, trying to keep her awake but it was no use - she died in my hands at 18:32 at just 2 months old. I suppose it would be easy to blame her death on her being inbred, the conditions of her cage or something like that but the fact is I didn't pay enough attention to her.

Number of Hamsters

I now know that 7 hamsters is too many to look after when every one of them need held every night, needs to have fresh food and water every day and needs cleaned out at least once a week. Even with my sister looking after 3 of them, I still had a lot of work to do, especially making sure she looked after Muffin, Fidget and Cinnamon. I recommend getting 1 or 2 hamsters at a time. They can't be placed in the same cage as they'll fight with (and kill) each other, or mate.

Care

Hamsters require very little care, making them great pets for people who are working all day and they're nocturnal so you could just pay them some attention before you go to bed and they'll be fine. I have school every weekday and I volunteer in Oxfam all day on Saturdays but I still have plenty of time to give all of my hamsters the care and attention they need.

Toys

My current hamsters don't like toys (apart from their ball) but previous pets have had labarynth's (a plasic make which can be re-built - you put a peanut or something they like at one end and let them try and find it. Sparky and Muffin tended to just sit there doing nothing so I got rid of it since they weren't using it. They do like to have small tunnels in their cage though. These cost a lot from the pet shop so I tend to use the insides of toilet rolls. They're safe and it helps the environment as I'm not throwing them out as I otherwise would.
They often don't need toys, though! They'll make their own fun. All of my hamsters enjoy swinging from the bars in their cages and running in their wheels. Their favourite game, however, is to see how far they can get after escaping before I realise they're gone. Sparky's the worst for that one!


Breeding

Breeding hamsters is a rewarding venture and requires little effort. It is amazing getting to see a little blind, naked hamster grow right in front of you - they get bigger every day and develop really quickly! It's also very interesting. I took standard grade biology last year and found the section on genetics intriguing. It made me want to find out more about hamster genetics which I have done from studying all the babies.

However, you will be bringing living things into the world so if you decide to breed hamsters you need to make sure either you can either look after the babies or find suitable homes for them.

Colours and Variations

Hamsters come in all sorts of colours, with many different patterns of coat. My favourite colour is albino (which is all white with white ears and ruby-red eyes) and my favourite pattern is piebald (two different colours in patches). If you want to know more about the different colours available before buying a hamster, you'll have to do some research as there are far to many to list in a review. The most popular colour is golden, which was the colour of the first ever captured wild hamster.

History

Don't worry, I'm not going to bore you with a long history lesson. I'll make it as brief as possible.
Syrian Hamsters, as their name suggests, come from Syria. The original hamsters, from which all domestic hamsters in the world came from (before more wild hamsters were caught much later), were a mother and her litter of 11 babies. I find it fascinating how the millions of domestic hamsters kept today all came from one small group - it has a sort of "Adam and Eve" feel to it. They were kept in labs for a while until people decided they'd make good pets and the pet market boomed.

The history of hamsters before domestication is interesting for one reason - hardly anything is known about them. Some scientists spotted them before they were actually caught but they made very few observations on them.

Conclusion

Syrian Hamsters are excellent pets. Requiring very little care and attention, they are affectionate and, more importantly, cute. They are easy to breed and have an interesting history. I recommend them to anyone as a pet.

Summary: Brilliant pets and interesting animals.