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| And this is the lovely TamTam! | |
On this page you can find out about my hamsters! I started keeping hamsters because I had no room for any bigger critters (except for the snails of course) when I moved into my bedsit in Oxford. Because hamsters can live in a self-contained cage and don't need lots of floor-space to run about in, I thought they might just be ideal.
I started with a syrian hamster, ginger and white markings, one bright red eye and one black eye. I should have realised that there was something odd with him when I went to the petshop. He was fully grown, and all his littermates had been sold weeks ago. His natural expression was one of pure evil and he was not impressed at being picked up and handled by the petshop assistant. But I felt sorry for him because he was all grown up and still hadn't got a home, and also his red/black eye combination appealed to me. Se we took him home on the bus. On the way home he ate a hole in the cardboard carrier. Lucky we had put the carrier INSIDE the new cage for ease of transportation. But it was once we got home that the trouble really started. I assembled the cage and bedding etc while D held the carrier, bitten end upwards, trying to stop the hamster from escaping. Once it was all ready we tried to put the hamster into his new cage. He made hideous screeching noises from within his cardboard carrier and refused to be tempted out. We did eventually get him safely in, with only a few major wounds to our hands in the process. He quickly removed his nest box from the wall and learnt how to chew the metal bars very very loudly. He climbed the bars, he swung from the lid, he chewed everything and he pooed on everything. We soon learnt that he preferred the nest box to be situated right in the middle of the floor of the cage, and that, despite what all the books say about hamsters being very clean animals, he was determined to poo and pee in exactly the same place as he was determined to sleep, - his nest. He also stored all his food in amongst the poo. Very un-hamsterlike! We called him "Thing" because nobody could come up with a name that seemed to suit him, and after a bit it got changed to "Mr Thing" because he clearly expected more formality from us! After the first few days we began trying to handle him, starting by just introducing our hands into the cage (he would literally fly from wherever he was in the cage and attack instantly!) and then by attempting to scoop him up and let him sit on our hands. We were patient and we tried every technique we could find. We were gentle and calm and persevered for months. But that hamster just didn't want to be handled, and more than that, he didn't want you to go anywhere near his cage unless you were bringing food. He developed a preference for running ON TOP of the wheel rather than in it, leaning against the cage bars as he pedalled the wheel around and around. The constant friction of the bars against his back gave him a bald patch which never went away, and from his perch atop the wheel he would survey the room whenever we were at home - no matter what time of day. Put a finger (or any object) within a few centimetres of the cage bars and he would be there in a microsecond, baring his yellow teeth and trying to get hold of it. He really enjoyed running on the floor in an exercise ball, and using the exercise ball was the only way we could get him out of the cage. I would open the door in the bars and hold the ball over the entrance, he would climb in, I would slam the lid shut as fast as I could, and then clean the cage or whatever while he was running on the floor. No way were we allowed to touch him without sustaining quite spectacular bite wounds. Clearly there was something wrong with him in the head-department, and it turned out that there was also something wrong in the health-department. We had had him for only around 5 months when he died, at the grand old age of 8 months old.
Hamsters "take two" happened the very same day that we buried Mr Thing. I was very upset, worrying that I had been bad at keeping him and Dave trying to reassure me that I had done all I could, and so on and so forth. The flat was so very quiet though, with no wheel squeaking around and around and no clang clang of metal bars being chewed. Se we headed off to the petshop to have a look at their selection of small rodents, thinking we might prefer gerbils as they are less prone to being evil and biting a lot. We agreed that there was no pressure and if we didn't see anything that we fell in love with we would leave it till another day. Don't ever take me into a petshop assuming that I won't fall in love with *something*! There was, in fact, a female syrian hamster with red eyes and ginger and white markings, living alone, - another troublesome one I think, but Dave persuaded me to not take pity on this one and rather to have a look at all the other creatures available. There were mice and rats and gerbils but what really caught my eye (and Dave's!) were the dwarf russian hamsters - known as Campbell's hamster or the Djungarian hamster. These are pack creatures and can be kept in pairs or groups (apparently!). Compared with Syrian hamsters they are absolutely tiny, and sort of rounded in shape. We looked at a group of 5 females. We chose the two boldest hamsters from the group, the ones that we could pick up and examine easily and were the most curious about us. They both had the standard markings that you would see in the wild and were quite hard to tell apart. They were so cute and tiny! But of course this choice entailed getting a new cage as they could slip through the bars of the old cage, so we ended up on the bus with a huge amount of shopping again having spent far more money than planned! We had much more success with this pair of hamsters - they were inquisitive and friendly and enjoyed being handled, although one of them was prone to biting me. We enjoyed watching them interact with each other as well, and had hysterics watching them both fall off the shelves in the cage, headfirst, or hurl themselves out of their wheel randomly. They were very clumsy! However, in late August after a night out at the St Giles Funfair we got home to discover the hamsters behaving rather oddly. The slightly more bite-prone one, - generally a bit more nervous than her sister, was lying flat out on one of the shelves of the cage, panting hard. The other one was sitting at the other end of the cage, trying to get herself as wet as possible from the water-feeder (hamsters hate being wet and so this was very odd) and chewing at her behind. Closer inspection revealed she was sitting on a smear of blood, and so we took her out and had a look and discovered she had suffered a rectal prolapse, - something that is apparently quite common to dwarf hamsters. The other hamster was too stressed out to let us pick her up at this point and we were worried that they might have had a fight (a good nip to the behind could have caused the prolapse, or even increased stress can trigger it). We could see that we had to do something about the one that had suffered the prolapse and so booked an emergency vet. We had to drive all the way out to Woodstock for this, and we bunged both hamsters into the car so that the vet could check the other one for injuries at the same time. He had to use a gardening glove to do this as she was so upset she was turning over and exposing all her teeth and he was afraid to pick her up with a bare hand. The good news was that she was ok and only needed to be kept calm and quiet for a few days to get over the stress. The bad news was that rectal prolapse is usually fatal. The vet was a good sport, gave the hamster some gas and tried to poke her bowels back inside using a bit of vaseline, but when she woke up and started running about they all just popped back out again and it was decided that although she *seemed* ok, running about and drinking water, we had to put her to sleep as she could not survive in that condition. So that was very sad indeed, driving back home in the middle of the night with just one hamster left. She thrived on having the cage to herself. She got big and very bold and really enjoyed herself running about in the cage, jumping up and down off the various toys and shelves, and coming out for trips up and down Dave's arm, a treat which she particularly relished as she tried to eat his watch-strap and make dashes up to his shoulders and back! She never got too keen on being handled by me, - she usually nipped if I picked her up, although I got quite confident with her and she didn't bite very hard. I loved watching her play in the cage - she was very endearing and a real little personality. We even found a miniature exercise ball designed for dwarf hamsters so she could run on the floor. However, she developed diabeties(confirmed by dipping testing strips into her urine), another thing that dwarf hamsters are prone to, and at ome stage was very sick. I did a lot of research and by modifying her diet drastically she got better and for some months was back to her usual self. She had a trip to the vet to clip her tiny claws as they had got long, and the vet was very impressed with how well behaved she was and how well she was doing given the diabetes. Eventually she succumbed to chronic renal failure - and although she was lively and happy right to the last day, she did lose weight and got bald patches. I kept a close eye, ready to take her to the vet if it appeared she was in pain, but in the end, after a long day of playing, nesting and eating she went into some sort of coma and I let it happen naturally.
I got my current syrian male, Tameron, quite some time before the death of my little dwarf girlie. I hadn't intended to end up with 2 hamsters, especially with the need for 2 seperate cages! I went to the pet shop with a friend who wanted to choose some fancy fish, and there was a cage full of bundles of fluff. Yes, you guessed it, long haired "angora" or "teddy bear" hamsters. Tameron (he answers to Tammy, TamTam or "baby boy") caught my eye instantly. He's a pale golden colour with enormous silly ears and huge dark eyes. If you catch him in bright light his eyes are actualy blue, but the pupils are usually so big that you can't see this. He has a full "skirt" of the softest, longest fluff you can imagine and honestly looks like a toy, not a pet! He's quite big for a hamster and extremely laid back and easy going. He loves coming out of his cage to run in his ball, or sometimes free on the floor. He enjoys being stroked and handled and I sometimes use an old soft toothbrush to keep his long fur looking sleek. He's never, ever bitten me, never even tried to, and is quietly inquisitive about everything. He's great fun!
I am not going to put up information how to care for hamsters as I am not an expert and there is loads of useful information on the web already. I will be uploading photos of my hamsters at some point in the future though and might even think of something more interesting to do with this page than just giving you a long story about getting pet hamsters!
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