Our dwarf baby hamsters are now three weeks old and we were getting to the stage of needing to think about sexing the hamsters and separating them with their respective parent. Unfortunately, Sunny (dad) has hastened up the whole process by having a sudden personality swap! His nomination for father of the year has been removed after his repeated attempts to attack the babies and scare them half witless. Although no babies appeared to be physically harmed, he made his feelings towards them known with lunging, high pitched squeals and threatening behaviour.

This posed a real problem for us as we had planned to put the male babies in with him but realised that this was now probably an unwise option. Fortunately, we have had some really great advice from some dwarf hamster experts on our new hamster discussion forum . We realised that we had no option but to separate Sunny from the baby hamsters, both male and femal, as the risk that he would have seriously harmed or killed them by the morning would have been too great.

Laura and Diane hastily reassembled an old cage and sadly removed Sunny from the family home. It was with a really heavy heart, as he had been such a supportive and helpful dad up until this point. We didn’t know how he would react to being taken from his partner Elly and all the babies - we were soon to find out!

Sunny became quite frantic once on his own, desperately scratching the sides of his cage and trying to climb out, it was terrible to see him in such distress. We decided that this was too cruel and made a short term decision to reunite him with Elly, but to leave the hamster pups together on their own. Our friends on the forum assured us that, although the babies were still suckling from Elly at times, they would be able to look after themselves. We had certainly seen them using the water bottles and taking solid food, so we felt assured that they would be OK.

Well, Sunny and Elly are back together - Sunny is so delighted and has unfortunately been displaying his great affection as only male hamsters know how. Let’s hope we don’t hear the patter of more tiny paws too soon! Elly is still a young hamster and we don’t really want her to be breeding, but it’s a bit of a problem as they get so distressed when apart. It was suggested to us that we could maybe separate them with a wire partition so that at least they could see and smell each other. We’ll need to think carefully about what’s best for them both.

As for our hamster babies - talk about when the cat’s away! They have had a ball without mum and dad around and have really amused us. Check out the video and you’ll probably agree that they don’t seem to be missing the old folks too much at all!

Diane
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