Feeding Tips for Hamsters

When feeding hamsters, a balanced diet and activity are important. These feeding tips will keep your hamster healthy and happy.

With these tips, you can ensure that your hamster has a healthy and balanced diet that also keeps him busy and does justice to his natural instincts.

Feed regularly – your hamster needs this food!

Although hamsters, even if kept as pets, stock up on their food, it is of course still important that you feed your hamster regularly and provide it with a balanced diet.

As a basis, a hamster needs one to two teaspoons of grain-based ready-to-eat food per day. He also needs some fresh food every day. This can be a piece of carrot, dandelion leaves, or a strawberry. You should be careful with fruit as it often contains too much sugar, which is harmful to hamsters. The animals should therefore not eat some types of fruit.

In addition, the following tips contribute to a healthy and balanced diet for hamsters:

• It is important that the water in the drinking bottle is refilled every day. It should also be rinsed out thoroughly and filled with fresh water once a week.
• The golden hamster only needs live or protein food every two to three days (note: this varies from breed to breed, dwarf hamsters, for example, need it every day).
• You can also give your little rodent a treat, such as a peanut or a raisin, two to three times a week. The animals are also happy about some hard bread to gnaw on.
• You should give the hamster fresh gnawing material once a week. He is just as happy about millet as he is about a dog biscuit.

Combine feeding and occupancy of hamsters

Hamsters naturally want to engage in activities as soon as they wake up in the evening. The wild conspecifics often travel long distances in search of food and have to be constantly on the lookout for possible attackers. Your rodent will be happy if you make “everyday life” similar to him. As an activity and play opportunity, you have the following options, for example:

• For example, you can scatter seeds around the enclosure so he can look for them. However, a small portion belongs in the feeding bowl – to control loss of appetite and any associated illness.
• You can hang the coveted spray millet, which rodents taste just as good as birds, higher up on the cage. So the hamster first has to make an effort to get upstairs and then spends a while nibbling off the millet. For the Roborovsky hamster, which is not so adept at climbing, you should place the spray millet further down.
• If you give your hamster peanuts, it is best to keep them in the shell, which you only lightly crack. The hamster then spends a long time trying to get the nuts out of the shell.
• Dwarf hamsters in particular sometimes need animal protein in their diet. At the sight of a grasshopper or cricket, which you can get from the pet shop, the little rodents get really excited. There you can experience a real hunt.

Feeding made easy

If you don’t want to make any mistakes when feeding your hamster, you can also buy food. Here you will find the most popular food for hamsters:

Basic tips for feeding hamsters

You should definitely observe the following basics when feeding hamsters.

Tips for the feeding bowl

Here are a few things to keep in mind when buying food bowls for your hamster:

• It is important to buy two food bowls: one for dry food and one for fresh food.
• The food bowls should be heavy enough that they won’t tip over. Ceramic or earthenware bowls are ideal.
• A diameter of about five centimeters is suitable so that the rodent cannot sit down in its food. The food bowls should have a rim about an inch high that goes inward. The feeding bowls from Popetpop* are suitable, for example.
• A nipple bottle with a ball cap is best for storing drinking water. On the other hand, you should avoid an open drinking vessel, as the water gets dirty too quickly.

Feed preparation tips

You should consider the following when preparing food for your hamster:

• Fresh food such as fruit, vegetables, and green fodder must be rinsed off with warm water and dried again before feeding. You should also wash gnawing material such as branches and twigs beforehand.
• The fresh food or food containing protein straight from the refrigerator is too cold for the rodents. It is a good idea to take the food out of the fridge earlier and feed it when it has reached room temperature.
• If you collect wild herbs for your hamster, then never near busy roads or on dog playgrounds. If you are not very familiar with wild herbs, it is better to keep your hands off them – if, in doubt, they could be poisonous!

Hamsters are part of their natural eating habits

Already knew? Even if the hamster’s feeding bowl is supposedly empty, that doesn’t mean that the rodent has nothing to eat. He often simply bunkered the food in his hiding places. Because although hamsters kept as pets are not threatened by food shortages, unlike their relatives living in the wild, they still have this basic instinct and prepare themselves for bad times by “hamstring”.