I'm lookig for some serious help....

I have 11 baby hamsters, that are about 2 weeks old...i need to know how to
fand water them, as their mommy decided that they were her food of choice, and
had to be removed.

I am also looking to get rid of a few hamsters, in a few weeks!  :)

Thanks!  :)

17 responses total.

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well, at this point, i've lost three...i simply cannot be there to feed them
evevery few hours...i have to work...sigh


i looked in the liberary....the one downtown didn't have much, so i'm going to
have to keep loking...

My daughter got two Dwarf Siberian hampsters that were born last September.
One died in November and the other this week. No cause was apparent. They both
had water, food, and lots of attention. They both had wheels for running, and
we observed that they got rather fanatic about running - going very fast for
long periods (this is the only behavior that seemed excessive, so I mention
it). Is this variety especially short lived?

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My daughter got another (white) dwarf hamster a month ago - and it died
this morning. Again, no symptoms - the situation was identical to that
described above. I've search the web for information and, while I found
pages with a lot of disease information, nothing fitted this "sudden
hamster death syndrome".

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Thanks for the ideas, valerie. I reviewed this with Vittoria. All the
potential problems you list did not apply. The pet store this hamster
came from said it slept all the time, and it would not know how to use a
wheel: both turned out to be untrue. It did have a cloudy eye - I'm not sure
it was very young. The first two hamsters were young, however. We are
wondering if whether the factors that did change - given a wheel, and much
more handling, could be factors. Still, no symptoms leading up to death.

Has anyone in the house had a bad cold, or sore throat or other virusy
symptoms recently?  They don't use guinea pigs in medical research for
nothing.  and sometime little rodents can pick up nasty viruses from being
handled by a sick person.  

Vittoria had a mild cold and stayed home from school one day, but no fever
- just great tiredness. She did not have sniffles, nor did the hamster
(hamster sniffles are described in
http://www.zo.com/user/boopers/hamster.html#sick or
http://netvet.wustl.edu/species/hamsters/hamsters.txt). 
There is also a useful hamster FAQ at
http://www.jagnet.demon.co.uk/hamster/faq.html

Thanks, our house is rampant with hamsters and guinea pigs, and other little
creatures.  I'm always worried when they start sneezing or drooping.  

My daughter has gotten another dwarf hamster, this time from Meijers. The
saleperson suggested that the sudden hamster death syndrome "could" happen
because of heart failure, following excessive running on a wheel. This may
just be speculation - I don't think Meijers requires hamster expertise for
their employees. It does, however, fit the circumstances. This hamster
will not be given a wheel more than an hour or so a day. (Even I am
supposed to exercise only up to 75-80% of my age-adjusted maximum heart
rate, but I don't know the formula for hamsters.) 

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Mice are a different genus. 

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Excess spinning could be a problem.  Hamsters might overexert themselves out
of boredom.

Not only a different genus, but a different sub-family of the family Muridae.
(I am reminded of the *extreme* toxicity of PCBs to guinea pigs (I think
it is) among all rodents.) 

Yesterday sometime one of my daughter's two dwarf hamsters murdered the
other one. We had observed them fighting, apparently over food, which was
not provided in infite supply to keep them from getting too fat. However
we do not know the motivation for this murder.

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