You’re Sure You Don’t Want a Hamster?

Two weeks later, he turned into this.

The mostly black baby that looked like this:

Now looks like this:

And the black and white babies that were still nursing a week ago:

Now look like this:

The first problem with 4-week-old baby hamsters is that they have teeth.  Let’s zoom in on the photo above and you’ll see what I mean.

The other problem is that at about 4 weeks, baby hamsters start exploring and climbing.  In fact, within days of adding an addition to the Snuggles’ cage, the babies figured out how to climb to the top.  The problem with that was two-fold:  it was a long ways down to the bottom if they fell off one of the shelves at the top, and Snuggles no longer had an escape from her babies.

Since Snuggles had done an exceptional job raising her babies and the babies were clearly ready to be on their own, we decided to separate Snuggles from her babies.  Then, upon reading that boys and girls can reproduce at eight weeks, we separated the boys from the girls. 

The fun part about having four girl hamsters in one cage is that they all tried getting on the exercise wheel at the same time.

The girl hamster on the far left got flung out the wheel without injury.

The four boys were moved into a new cage called the Extreme Challenge, a name we thought was silly until we realized it really was an extreme challenge for two boy hamsters to exercise on an enclosed wheel at the same time without one of them tumbling around and around like a coin in a washing machine.  We ended up duct-taping their wheel so they wouldn’t hurt each other.  The boys soon found the wheel a great place to sleep.

As a result, this is what my kitchen counter looks like.  The boys’ cage is on top of the girls’ cage.  Little Runt’s cage is to the right.  Behind those cages are the cages that hold Nibbles and, in a separate cage, Little Buddha.  Snuggles occupies the first cage in our front entryway all by herself.

Accordingly to everything we’ve read online, boy hamsters will fight to the point we’ll have to separate them all at some point.  And since girls sometimes fight too, we might have to separate all of them, too.  I’m prepared to have 11 cages in my house if I have to, but it’s really nothing I had dreamed about.   So if you’ve ever wanted a baby hamster, these are ready to roll.  And roll.  And roll.