Question
Ponyo
Jedediah-
About six months ago one of my students gave me a female russian dwarf (as best as I can tell) that he got from someone else. As you can guess, I know nothing of its history.
She is a class pet for a 7th grade Science classroom. The room can be loud and students get close to her cage. She is inquisitive and just sleeps through most of it. On the weekends she comes home where she is showered with affection. She is handled daily and hand fed.
At first she would let us put our hands in her cage. When she figured out that hands meant handling she started biting them. Even if I put food in my palm she will bite my hand. So then we would wait until she was on her wheel and let her jump onto our hands. That ended too. For a while I decided that I would let her bite me, and resolved not to flinch, hoping she would just get used to me hand. This didn't work and the biting just got worse. At one point she latched onto my husband's finger and did not let go.
About this time she would bite any finger touching her cage instead of just sniffing it like she used to. I cannot set my hand against her cage, even on top, or she will climb up and bite it. She also responds to people near her cage by climbing and pawing at them (we call it boxing because she looks like she is throwing a punch)
We started holding our hands in front of her open cage door and letting her walk onto our hands. This lasted a while, but she learned that too. She learned "the toilet tube", and "the shirt" right away. The shirt is when my husband opens the door and holds his outstretched shirt over the gate. He waits for her to walk onto it and then gathers her up to handle her.
I feed her treats through the bars of her cage and let her walk onto my palm to get food. I talk to her when I near her cage and when I handle her.
Despite all this, she was always excellent at being handled. Once out of the cage she was loving and gentle. The students were instructed to hold out flat palms and she would walk from hand to hand exploring them without a nip. The only time she ever bit my hand out of the cage was when I checked her for parasites.
Now she is biting while being held. If I hold her for too long she will nip. Then I put her in her cage because it seems like a signal that she is done being held. If a student is holding her and I put out my hand to take her back she will nip before she finally walks onto me hand. I was hoping that maybe she just didn't like me, but my students report that she nips when they hold her too.
This change seems to coincide with the addition of two female rats to our room. Rest assured they are in separate cages.
She is in a 20x20x20 metal cage with a plastic bottom
I feed her pellets, nut and seed mixes, oats and the occasional leafy green
Her bedding is changed about every week and a half
She is in her wheel most of her waking hours
AnswerDear Emily,
thank you for your question.
I would recommend getting her a much bigger cage, the one she has now is about 1/3 of what I would consider the minimum for a dwarf hamster. Despite being so small, they really need a lot of space to run and dig. Small cages can cause aggression with dwarf hamsters, especially inside the cage since they will defend their territory. A bigger cage also doesn't have to be cleaned that much, hamsters should be cleaned as little as possible and only about half of the bedding at a time to keep the disturbance minimal. In a big enough cage, you can get away with cleaning only the toilet corner and nothing else for three or four months.
I suspect that she is also stressed by the noise and by being handled a lot. She may not come out of her house during the day and it may look like she is sleeping through it all, but hamsters are not really suited for being kept in loud rooms, it's a source of stress for them. Some hamsters enjoy being handled and petted, but many don't and the nippnig may be her way of telling you that she's bothered by being handled so much. A bigger cage may change that, though, hamster often become more relaxed in big cages.
I hope I was of some help to you
Jennifer
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