... but when the book in question is entitled "How To Care For Your Roborovski Pet Dwarf Hamster" and has a picture of a cream banded Syrian on the front, it doesn't bode well!
I have been browsing Amazon looking at the various hamster books. I have two that I think are really good -- Hamsterlopaedia and the Dwarf Hamsters Pet Owner's Manual -- but I am definitely a bibliophile! I would love all good hamster books, but even reading through reviews on Amazon isn't enough. How do I know that all the good reviews on a book are by hamster-savvy people? I keep meaning to do reviews on the two I have, maybe this will give me the kick up the backside I need.
And so this post isn't all text, here's a video of Winter and Rocco. Rocco has now outgrown his dad and there have been a few scuffles for dominance, but Rocco is now four months old so in Robo adolescence (3-6 months), and I wasn't expecting complete peace from them!
(And apologies for the lack of blogging recently. Lets just leave it as Real Life Sucks.)
Sunday, 23 June 2013
Sunday, 2 June 2013
Long time no post! AKA Annie's cage tour June 2013
So I am back from my holiday, all nice and relaxed, so I decided to do an overhaul of Annie's cage layout!
On the left she has her coconut (currently containing nesting material), her hamster sized sputnik, her climbing frame with a piece of slate on top and a chewed up toilet roll tube underneath, a wooden log tunnel with a flavoured wood chew underneath it, a ping pong ball egg thing, and parts of her old daisy chain chew scattered around on the floor. I've filled this half with tonnes of substrate to try and encourage her to start digging again -- she did it all the time in her old barred cage but now she can't fling substrate all over the floor outside the cage she seems to have lost interest!
In the middle she has her sand bath/toilet jar and her "guinea pig" sized corner house, with a bendy bridge so she can climb onto the roof from the shallow substrate half of the cage. It's also the table for her water bowl (she can't have a bottle due to her metal chewing habit). At the bottom of the picture you can just about see her kitchen roll tube which I have torn into one long spiral so she doesn't get trapped in it -- the diameter of a kitchen roll tube, and a toilet roll tube for that matter, is perfect for dwarfs but too small for Syrians to get through comfortably or with full cheek pouches.
On the right she has her 11 inch wooden wheel, her see-saw, a grass nest and a hedgehog shaped antos dog chew that appears to be lying on its face! You can't see it in this picture, but there's also a carrot shaped chew meant for rabbits that's blocking the water bottle hole so she can't chew the plastic there, which is in the picture below. Also in the picture below, you can see her Ferplast rat tube, which spans across the cage, and the other part of her daisy chain chew which is hanging from the bars by a cable tie.
This is Annie's cage, which is a zoozone 2 aka the zoozone large, which has dimensions of 100 by 50 centimetres. As you can see, the bar spacing on the top is quite large, and needs to be meshed to prevent escapes. I used 6 millimetre square mesh because it is impossible for Annie to chew it, but mesh with larger spacing such as 13 millimetre square mesh is also fine if you don't have to worry about your hamsters trying to chew anything metal or bar like!
On the left she has her coconut (currently containing nesting material), her hamster sized sputnik, her climbing frame with a piece of slate on top and a chewed up toilet roll tube underneath, a wooden log tunnel with a flavoured wood chew underneath it, a ping pong ball egg thing, and parts of her old daisy chain chew scattered around on the floor. I've filled this half with tonnes of substrate to try and encourage her to start digging again -- she did it all the time in her old barred cage but now she can't fling substrate all over the floor outside the cage she seems to have lost interest!
In the middle she has her sand bath/toilet jar and her "guinea pig" sized corner house, with a bendy bridge so she can climb onto the roof from the shallow substrate half of the cage. It's also the table for her water bowl (she can't have a bottle due to her metal chewing habit). At the bottom of the picture you can just about see her kitchen roll tube which I have torn into one long spiral so she doesn't get trapped in it -- the diameter of a kitchen roll tube, and a toilet roll tube for that matter, is perfect for dwarfs but too small for Syrians to get through comfortably or with full cheek pouches.
On the right she has her 11 inch wooden wheel, her see-saw, a grass nest and a hedgehog shaped antos dog chew that appears to be lying on its face! You can't see it in this picture, but there's also a carrot shaped chew meant for rabbits that's blocking the water bottle hole so she can't chew the plastic there, which is in the picture below. Also in the picture below, you can see her Ferplast rat tube, which spans across the cage, and the other part of her daisy chain chew which is hanging from the bars by a cable tie.
And that's it! It's a fairly big layout change for Annie, but she seems to be enjoying it so far!
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